Figure 15 – Key Franco-German interactions as reported on Twitter by Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel

The meetings between the German Chancellor and the French President, and outlined in Figure 15, were taken as a case study to assess if and how EU leaders tweet about their bilateral meetings in the same way. Between January 2019 and June 2020, there were 13 meetings (physical meetings, telephone calls, video calls) between the French and German members of the European Council, as reported via Twitter. Of these, eight specific bilateral meetings were held in their respective countries (including two phone calls), as well as five bilateral meetings on the margins of European Council or other meetings, such as G7 Summits. Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron held many more meetings together with third parties, such as in the Normandy format, the meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister during a G7 meeting and with the Chinese President at a meeting in Paris, which have been excluded from this analysis.