Despite talk of the negotiations getting bogged down, the French president seems to understand that the process is about politics more than legal complexity.
To listen to some commentators a few weeks ago, you’d have thought it was only EU membership – not shared interests and values – that brings allies together.
At a time when austerity continues, we need to be explain that we are not wasting taxpayers’ money on a grand delusion that we can create prosperity.
Merkel has appalled her own followers by making sweeping concessions to the Social Democrats.
Law and Justice’s agenda is being wildly misunderstood – or misrepresented – by its critics and enjoys the strong support of the voters.
The EU bureaucracy, with its supranational claims, is a godsend to him. But he is more pragmatic than he looks. He does not want a Hungary without allies.
If both of the main parties remain locked together in an unpopular pact, it creates more space in which new challengers can grow.
Conventional German politics is still paralysed because being German is still almost impossibly difficult, and being European is pretty difficult, too.
The German consensus which placed no significant party to the right of the CDU, thus bolstering it as a governing force, is breaking down.
If the measures involved prove unnecessary, any money lost will be a fraction of the financial gains from having secured a mutually acceptable deal.
Berlin has a quite different, and far more leisurely, sense of time to London.
The Prime Minister may well be better fitted than any of her rivals to carry through Brexit.
His new thriller is readable, but lets the British Prime Minister and Establishment of 1938 off far too lightly.
He discusses his new book, Hearts and Minds, in which he traces the change in Conservative ideas from Thatcher to Cameron and beyond.
But could Germany, in the wake of its election result, now become the prime bulwark against Macron’s and Juncker’s ambitions?