The Frenchman, who is looking for arm wrestling with Berlin when it comes to the ban on combustion engines

The timing was right for Bruno Le Maire. On Monday, France's super-minister for economy and finance met with two European Commission heavyweights: Valdis Dombrovskis, the agency's vice-president responsible for economic affairs, and Frans Timmermans, the vice-president responsible for fighting climate change.

It was a good opportunity for the three politicians to discuss the current dispute over the ban on the combustion engine. The French government already has good relations with Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, who is responsible for fleet limits. The German resistance to the ban on combustion engines has not only upset Brussels, but is also increasingly becoming a problem for the relationship between Berlin and Paris.

The day before, Le Maire had rammed pegs into the subject in an interview with the public radio station Franceinfo. The politician said in the interview that he was ready to fight for the ban on combustion engines. The declaration of war against Berlin was also streamed as a video.

The conservative politician made it clear that he was also ready for a tough argument with Federal Minister of Transport Volker Wissing and Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck. "We are ready for a showdown on this issue because it is an environmental mistake," Le Maire told the interviewer. "I also think it's an economic mistake, because we're five to ten years behind China in electric vehicles, so we have to do double our efforts." He was ready to "arm wrestle" with Berlin.

The traffic light's unusual action of stopping a law that had been negotiated for months and passed in several rounds in a kind of guerrilla tactic at the last minute has also annoyed other EU countries. They fear that other EU members could copy this tactic, which has practically never been used before.

That could explain to some extent why Bruno Le Maire, who is actually considered a great friend of Germany in French politics, is so harsh towards Berlin. Le Maire, who has a university degree in German, speaks fluent German and only last year, Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) awarded him the Grand Cross of Merit with Star and Ribbon on behalf of the Federal President for his commitment to Franco-German friendship. Seven years earlier, Le Maire had already received the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class.

Franco-German relationship or not: Le Maire is pursuing its own agenda domestically. It is an open secret in Paris that the conservative politician wants to succeed French President Emmanuel Macron. In recent weeks, Le Maire's solo efforts in the media have repeatedly caused a stir in France.

Observers suspect that the popular minister wants to overshadow Macron. Most recently, Macron and Le Maire even quarreled publicly. A win over Germany would certainly help Le Maire, whose demeanor and rhetoric have become increasingly tough and uncompromising in the spotlight in recent years.

Especially since the most important minister in Macron's cabinet has invested a lot of political capital in recent years to free up many billions of euros for battery factories in France and elsewhere in Europe. As early as 2019, he announced a European battery initiative in an interview with WELT. The then Francophile Economics Minister Peter Altmeier had supported the industrial policy push from Paris. The relationship with the traffic light coalition, on the other hand, is less sunny than it was then.

Le Maire should also be annoyed that the FDP in particular is now torpedoing a piece of legislation that is considered a great success in France. France held the European Council Presidency when member states were negotiating the combustion ban and maneuvered the ban through the EU legislative process against Germany's opposition.

In the fight against German interests, however, Le Maire only partially knows that the interests of the French automobile industry are behind him. It has long since adjusted to the ban on combustion engines from 2035. Renault and the Stellantis group, to which Citroën and Peugeot belong, no longer want to sell combustion engines in Europe from 2030, and the Stellantis subsidiary Opel should even stop selling them in 2028. But the CEOs openly say that they consider the rapid phase-out of combustion engines to be dangerous and are calling for the ban to be revised.

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