Poland’s longstanding struggle for a bigger say in European leadership may finally be gaining ground with the revival of the long dormant Weimar Triangle – a diplomatic compact bringing Warsaw together with Germany and France in a regular dialogue on EU affairs.

When the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, joined the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, for a show of unity in Berlin last Friday, they breathed new political life into a format that has the unfulfilled potential to unite northern, southern and central Europe around a common agenda – especially in support of Ukraine.

The three leaders are coming from very different starting points. Poland is rushing to rearm itself and pouring assistance into Ukraine. Scholz is digging his heels in and refusing to give Kyiv Germany’s most potent long-range cruise missiles, while Macron has suddenly morphed into Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s most outspoken ally, even though Paris lags far behind Berlin in terms of the volume of its military aid.

Relations between France and Germany, long the EU’s leading couple, are as tense as they have been for ages, with domestic politics pulling them in opposite directions. The uber-cautious Scholz has to manage a fractious coalition including pacifists in his own Social Democratic party (SPD), while Macron’s new hawkishness is partly an attempt to wrong foot the rising hard-right opposition to his minority centrist government.

For the past decade, the Weimar Triangle has been more like the notorious Bermuda triangle of aviation fame – a void into which political initiatives episodically disappear without trace.

That was mainly because the previous Polish government, led by Jarosław Kaczyński’s conservative nationalist........

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