French Socialists soften tone on Merkel

By Sybille de La Hamaide

PARIS (Reuters) - France's ruling Socialist party will remove strongly worded criticism of German Chancellor Angela Merkel from a draft text on Europe that revealed the level of hostility Berlin's focus on austerity, its coordinator for Europe said on Sunday.

Cooperation between France and Germany has long provided the main motor for decision-making in the European Union. But a debt crisis has strained those ties in the past year as ideologically opposed leaders have disagreed on points of economic policy.

A document to be presented at a June party brainstorming conference on Europe had described the German leader as "self-centered" and said her austerity policies were hurting Europe.

But this "stigmatizing language used towards Angela Merkel" would now be removed, Jean-Christophe Cambadelis, deputy-chairman of the Party of European Socialists (PES), said on his website.

French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault also stepped in to stress the importance of the Franco-German dialogue and praised the friendship between Paris and Berlin which he said was indispensable to the European project and economic recovery.

"We will not solve Europe's problems without an intense and sincere dialogue between France and Germany," Ayrault, a former German teacher, said in tweets posted both in French and German.

The tone of the initial document added to growing criticism of Berlin from France after Socialist National Assembly speaker Claude Bartolone this week raised the prospect of a "confrontation" with Merkel.

A source in President Francois Hollande's office said on Friday that the document represented only the party, but did not dispute its central message.

In its first reaction to the comments on Merkel, Berlin played down any tension between the two countries.

"We work very well together. We don't have the feeling that there is a change in policy," Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert told Le Monde newspaper.

ISOLATED

Hollande was critical of Merkel's insistence on budget consolidation while he was running for president last year, but has adopted a more conciliatory tone since becoming president.

He often describes France's ties with EU paymaster Germany as defined by "friendly tension" between equal partners but some Socialists, including Bartolone, think this friendliness overstated.

Senior opposition politician and former Prime Minister Alain Juppe said told Le Monde he thought the trust between France and Germany had been broken and said that France had lost the credibility for a tough dialogue with Berlin.

"France is totally isolated," he said.

Hollande must rely on a solid Socialist majority in parliament to pass structural reforms this year, including overhauls of the jobless and pension systems. But a small camp of dissidents is growing, threatening his Senate majority.

The left-wing of the party accepted the idea of a single text to be presented at a meeting of the European Socialist in late June, but several disagreements remained, Cambadelis said, without detailing them.

"The battle for an alternative majority to the governing right-wing in Europe has begun," he said.

(Reporting by Sybille de La Hamaide; Editing by Jon Hemming)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/french-socialists-soften-tone-merkel-151724370.html

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