When long-standing German Chancellor Angela Merkel leaves office after the country's federal election on Sept. 26, all eyes will be on France.
Analysts say Macron would likely favor working with Scholz over Laschet, the candidate put forward by the ruling conservative CDU-CSU bloc as a successor to Merkel.
"Of the two leading Chancellor-candidates, sources in the Elysee suggest Macron would be comfortable with either man, but has a slight preference for Scholz, who has already, as federal finance minister, worked closely with Paris on the ground-breaking EU post-Covid recovery fund,' Eurasia Group's Mujtaba Rahman and Anna-Carina Hamker said in a note last week.
In 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, almost a quarter of the EU's gross domestic product was generated by Germany, followed by France and Italy , ahead of Spain and the Netherlands ,"Germany is Germany," Naz Masraff, director of Europe at Eurasia Group, told CNBC Thursday. "Even though France sees this as an opportunity, I don't think you're going to see Germany's role being diminished. It may be less effective but I don't think it will diminish.
"Inevitably, Merkel is going to be leaving very big shoes to fill after 16 years but at the end of the day, Germany is the key country in Europe and whoever is the German finance minister, whoever is the German chancellor, will be [leading] exactly that," she said.
"Under Macron, France is catching up nicely. But it is far away from really catching up to the economic and financial might of Germany," he said.
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