Paris.- Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel was invested today with an honorary doctorate by the Paris Institute of Political Sciences (Sciences Po) in a ceremony in which he warned that “the characteristic tolerance of Europe is constantly put to the test.”
«The soul of Europe is tolerance and we Europeans have been slow to realize this and put it into practice (…) but that tolerance is constantly put to the test by extremism on the right or left or by violence in the name of religion,” Merkel declared, before an audience of young people who gave her a standing ovation.
In a ceremony presided over by the former Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya, current dean of Sciences Po, Merkel gave a speech in German in which she emphasized European integration and Franco-German cooperation and in which she avoided addressing hot topics today.
The former German chancellor acknowledged that in the past there were disagreements with France about how to deal with crises in Europe (such as the sovereign debt crisis that included severe austerity plans in the south of the continent), but stressed that an understanding was finally reached for the good of the EU.
Merkel recalled that she worked with four French presidents with “different” political visions: Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron.
The former foreign minister quoted the latter on several occasions and recalled the pro-European speech that he gave in September 2017 precisely at Sciences Po.
For Merkel, one of the keys to her way of doing politics is commitment. “To get to him, sometimes it’s about making concessions and those concessions should not be seen as a defeat.”
