cafebabel.com director in French radio interview about 'Germanophobia'
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On 6 February Alexandre Heully, executive director of cafebabel.com, made an appearance as a guest speaker for a programme about ‘Germanophobia’ on ‘Des clics et des claques’ ('Clicks and Slaps') on Europe 1, alongside journalists Laurent Guimier, David Abiker and Guy Birenbaum.
In France, Germany is fashionable again.
With presidential elections only months away, current president Nicolas Sarkozy is been accompanied on his campaign trail left right and centre by German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Elsewhere in Europe, other politicians and journalists aren't being so chummy. Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has likened the new (German) president of the European parliament to a Kapo, whilst the Italian newspaper (and Berlusconi-owned) Il Giornale respnded to a column criticising the Italian ship captain of the sunken Costa Concordia in German magazine Der Spiegel, saying 'We have Schettino, you have Auschwitz'. The German media isn't innocent either; no-one can forget the row that erupted between the Greek and German media when Der Spiegel published an image of the goddess Venus with her middle finger up, during the worst of the eurozone crisis and before the Greek bailout...
So what were the conclusions of this discussion? Germanophobia is back in Europe, that's for sure, and it is a worrying prospect. However the issue is not so much Germany, but how Europeans will be able to overcome the economic crisis. Alexandre Heully welcomes the fact that European head of states help each other in political campaigns, purely as it shows that problems shall be resolved at a European level and not a national one. However he also argued that in the French situation, this is clearly the French president begging his German counterpart to assist him in his campaign because he is in a difficult position.
Watch the video, in French, here.