Merkel and Macron like a married couple?

The two leaders got along so well in Paris that a 100-year-old woman thought they were a couple

■

German leader Angela Merkel and her French counterpart Emmanuel Macron have had their ups and downs. Both of them have respectively been declared the new “leader of the free world” after President Barack Obama stepped down. Both are in domestic trouble.

And, according to one old woman, they could very well be a couple.

“Mr Macron, it’s not possible, a little good woman like me to shake hands with the President of the Republic, it’s fantastic,” the 100-year-old woman told Macron on the sidelines of a First World War commemorative event. The excited lady then turned to Merkel, arguably the world’s most powerful woman.

“You are Madame Macron,” the smiling centenarian said to Merkel, 64, confusing her with Macron’s wife Brigitte Macron, who is 65, according to France’s public broadcaster and Belgian television.

With an unmistakably German accent, an amused Merkel clarified in French multiple times: “I am the German chancellor.”

“It’s fantastic,” the 100-year-old lady responded.

Positive reaction

Under different circumstances, mistaking a female world leader for the wife of her male counterpart would be yet another example for the persistence of gender stereotypes. But reactions to Sunday’s remarkable exchange were overwhelmingly positive. To a woman who was born toward the end of the first devastating World War and who was a young woman when the Germans launched the second one, the FrancoGerman unity on display would have been completely younger self.

More than 30 million people were killed during the First World War. Only two decades later, 40 more million became victims of the Second World War, with half of them estimated to have been civilians. Postwar divisions impacted Franco-German relations early on, as more mass graves were discovered and trials uncovered the full horrors of Nazi occupation.

But during the second half of the 20th century, an understanding emerged between France and Germany that both nations were both geographically and politically tied together. That sentiment later helped establish the European Union, a project originally designed to preserve peace in Europe but now a far more expansive economic and political endeavour. unimaginable to her

AFP German Chancellor Angela Merkel (centre) with other women taking part in festivities to mark the 100th anniversary of the introduction of voting rights for women in Germany, yesterday at the German Historical Museum in Berlin.