Best Friends with Benefits

BERLIN — It’s an old story: Impetuous boy meets staid girl, who rolls her eyes at his shenanigans, then succumbs to his charms.

Into the sunset — or off to the Élysée Palace — they ride.

As the eurozone threatens to crumple, the strength of one partnership has surprised many of the continent’s watchers: the budding, unlikely personal and professional relationship between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Everything about the two — save a desire to prop up a currency union that has stumbled badly since last summer — is opposite.

He is a whirlwind, married to a model famous for her nude photo shoots and onetime drug use; notorious for his last-minute scheduling changes, including the cancellation of this Friday, Jan. 20’s mini-summit with Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti; and the general folderol long associated with playboy Western leaders. He is passionate and instinctive, known for acting on gut feelings.

She is systematic, stern, pantsuit-favoring, and no-nonsense — the archetype of East German pragmatism.

She is the strict headmistress to his easily distracted deputy. Together, they have somehow managed to discipline their unruly European neighbors — notably Greece’s George Papandreou and former Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi, who skirt-chased his country to the brink of bankruptcy. They have asked their eurozone counterparts to enforce tighter budget rules, which they say will be crucial as they work to stabilize the region in the coming months. At a December summit, they took their boldest step, unleashing the concept of a "fiscal compact" for the 17-member zone. And in what is arguably their boldest move to date, the two are arguing for a zone-wide financial-transaction tax to bolster coffers.

Just five years ago, says Yves Tiberghien, associate at the Center for European Studies at Sciences Po in Paris, based on the animosity between these two leaders of Europe’s largest economies, "people were saying that was the end of the German-Franco relationship."

When Sarkozy was elected in 2007, Merkel was already in office. At first, "the relationship was really bad," Tiberghien says. When it came to politics and the economy, they had diverging views on nearly everything.

The two had long clashed over a central theme of the debt crisis — what should be the role of the European Central Bank (ECB), established in 1998 to implement fiscal policy in the eurozone, in helping to dig the zone out of its debt.

While the French thought the ECB should stage an aggressive bailout to counteract a hazardous mass sell-off of government bonds, Merkel and the Germans maintained that, under EU agreements, the bank was not allowed to act as such a lender.

In November, following a series of talks with Italy’s Monti, Sarkozy presented a united front to reporters in Strasbourg. He and Merkel had agreed, it seemed, to remain a neutral pair. "We all stated our confidence in the ECB and its leaders," he said, "and stated that in respect of the independence of this essential institution, we must refrain from making positive or negative demands of it."

As their professional relationship has grown, so has their propensity to share lingering greetings and even, occasionally, jokes.

At a Brussels news conference in October, the two exchanged a smirk heard ’round the world after a reporter asked about Berlusconi. (Corriere della Sera, a leading Italian paper, called the behavior "excessive.")

The moment was one small step for friends everywhere and one giant leap for the pair, long plagued by differences in demeanor but now dubbed "Merkozy" by a cheeky European press.

"Sarkozy’s very physical, slapping guys on shoulders. He kisses women on the cheek," Tiberghien says. "With Merkel, that didn’t go over well" from the first days of their acquaintance.

What a difference five years and one economic crisis make.

The softening was first evident during speeches at the United Nations in 2008, during which both leaders said global finance was the root of the global recession and called for better global governance. But it wasn’t until Jan. 10, when Merkel finally acknowledged that austerity — one of her main tenets — could not alone salvage the eurozone, that they finally saw eye to eye. "Budget consolidation is one of the legs Europe’s future must be built on, but of course we need a second leg," she said in Berlin, Sarkozy alongside. "And that is … economic growth, jobs, and employment." Now they greet each other warmly, photos of their kissy greetings dotting global newspapers.

A YouTube satire of the German cult program Dinner for One, featuring Sarkozy as Merkel’s drunk butler and only remaining friend, has gone viral. When the pair met Dec. 6 for talks at the Élysée Palace, body-language experts dissected their greeting on the BBC.

"Although Mrs. Merkel instigates the handshake as she gets out of the car, her hand is refused by Mr. Sarkozy, who turns the ritual into a greeting kiss instead," expert Judi James said of the pair, who clasped hands, kissed on the cheek, and smiled, perhaps a little too broadly. "This suggests a clash of cultures with neither leader keen to give way to the other, and although Mrs. Merkel succumbs to the French form of greeting, she reboots the handshake once it’s over."

"It was reality that brought them together," argues Laurent Maruani, economics professor at HEC Paris. "We have a real couple. But there’s a long history between France and Germany."

The belief of former French administrations, including that of Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, was, "Let’s have an agreement with Germany, and then let’s go talk to others, to Italy and Spain," he says. "For a long time it’s been a relationship between the countries, not their presidents."

With Merkozy, the relationship has become more personal — not quite a love affair, but a budding friendship with benefits for both sides.

"They have found a way to bridge their differences, how they see the sovereign crisis in Europe," says Yannis Koutsomitis, an Athens-based media executive and commentator on European affairs. "I see it more as a marriage of convenience for both of them. They’ve each of them made some concessions."

Not everyone is sold on the idea of Merkel and Sarkozy as buddies. The growth of their relationship "is really dramatic," says Tiberghien. "It’s astonishing. But I think they still don’t like each other personally. It’s oil and water."

Their differences may turn out to be strengths. At the December G-20 summit in Cannes, the two leaders worked tirelessly to persuade Berlusconi to allow outside oversight of Italian economic reform. "Sarkozy became almost the bad cop for Merkel. He was saying everything Merkel wanted to say, but in her place, almost as if he wanted to be in her good graces. Maybe Sarkozy is afraid — because financially, France is vulnerable, almost like Italy now. It will only survive as long as it has German support."