PARIS — All through his presidential campaign, Emmanuel Macron touted his goal of a rejuvenated Europe with ideas that sounded clear and simple.

As French president, he would first restore his country’s economic credibility by convincing its European neighbors that he was dead serious about implementing long-overdue domestic reforms. Then, he would try to secure a German agreement to push for a more integrated eurozone, complete with its own budget, finance minister, and even micro-parliament.

Four months into his presidency, Macron’s ideas are still clear. But it turns out that they are far from simple. He still intends to see through the eurozone reforms he advocated as a candidate. But reality has struck.

First, the German election campaign makes it delicate for Macron to push hard ideas that run against Berlin’s reluctance, if not outright opposition. The second — less expected — source of skepticism about Macron’s eurozone designs comes from within the French government itself: There's a serious debate on the wisdom of pushing for a grand plan, which some say might not even be needed.

The German problem, long expected, is the main reason why France hasn't yet detailed its vision for the eurozone's future beyond the president’s vague campaign slogans. “We don’t know which parties will govern in coalition with Merkel in Berlin, and we didn’t want to embarrass her or others with proposals on the monetary union that might have become campaign topics,” said a French government official.

According to the Elysée, Macron will wait until the end of the month to make his detailed proposal public — just a few weeks before the next European Council meeting in mid-October. A preliminary discussion of deeper eurozone integration will take place at the informal meeting of EU finance ministers in Tallinn, Estonia, on Friday and Saturday.

'Subdued optimism'

Finance ministry officials and presidential aides speak of “subdued optimism” on Germany’s ultimate position. Chancellor Angela Merkel has publicly indicated that she could agree to the creation of a eurozone finance minister. Still, the German position on Macron’s eurozone plans is at best one of constructive ambiguity. Both sides have been able to fudge the issue so far only because the French president’s own proposals are fuzzy.

The terms of the debate are as old as the eurozone crisis but had more or less disappeared from the EU conversation until Macron came along. Also, the eurozone recovery looks strong, and the euro debt crisis looks like a thing of the past. The European Central Bank, with its negative interest rates and so-called “quantitative easing” program, is doing the heavy lifting for now. But they can’t last forever, and it’s up to governments to reform the eurozone to avoid another shock.

The only idea that Merkel supports wholeheartedly is that of a “European Monetary Fund,” proposed by her Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble.

The old German position is that fiscal restraint and structural reforms in the eurozone countries would suffice to avoid a repeat crisis. But most economists, including German ones, note that external shocks to the European economy would hit different member countries in different ways and that some form of pooling of resources and fiscal transfers — that is, the strong helping the weak — would be necessary in times of crisis to avoid another financial panic.

A joint eurozone budget administered by a common “finance minister” could serve that goal, the reasoning goes.

But a “common budget” doesn’t mean anything in itself. “The problem is that no one has agreed on what that budget would entail, meaning that no one knows what that so-called minister would do,” a French Treasury official said.

In Macron’s interview with Le Point in late August, he envisioned that the joint budget would amount to “several percentage points of GDP” of the monetary union, would be able to issue eurozone bonds, and would help finance public investment, as well as help cushion future financial shocks.

Contrast this with Merkel’s guarded endorsement of the idea at her summer press conference in Berlin a day before Macron’s interview was published. The common budget, she said, could be made up of “small contributions, not hundreds of billions of euros” from eurozone members and be devoted to rewarding countries that implement structural reforms. As for the eurozone finance minister, the person would merely help provide greater “coherence” in the economic policies of different countries.

That's also the vision outlined by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in his State of the Union speech on Wednesday — although he wants the joint economy and finance minister for the EU as a whole.

The only idea that Merkel supports wholeheartedly is that of a “European Monetary Fund” proposed by her Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble. A regional equivalent to the International Monetary Fund, the EMF would be tasked to rescue debt-strapped countries in exchange for a turnaround program.

After playing deaf when Schäuble first made the EMF proposal last spring, the French government now agrees that it could serve as a basis for discussion. What's more, some within the Macron administration even argue that eurozone reforms might not need to go any further.

“They should have jumped on the EMF proposal early on, because it was the first time the Germans implicitly admitted that some monetary creation should be involved in bailout programs. Don’t forget that the IMF, after all, is financed by central bank resources,” said Jean-Pierre Landau, a former deputy governor of the Banque de France, the French central bank.

Incremental progress

Landau and others argue that incremental progress through patient cooperation between France and Germany would be much more effective than grand reforms that might trigger political backlash.

Furthermore, government insiders say Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire, a conservative who is skeptical about the so-called “federalist” approach to European integration, is lukewarm to the Macron approach. Le Maire controls the Treasury's powerful bureaucracy, which is said to have fallen in line.

Skeptics of Macron’s grandiose plans agree that more needs to be done to make the eurozone safer and more stable. But they say it would be enough to complete the major reforms that have already been launched — such as the EU's banking union, arguably the most important reform of European institutions of the last 10 years.

Some worry that the creation of the EMF could serve as a pretext for the Germans to refuse any form of joint fiscal instrument in the future.

Transforming the current European Stability Mechanism — the bailout fund designed and created in the heat of the eurozone crisis — into the German-proposed EMF would then complete the reforms.

"There are many things to do to reform, fix or complete existing eurozone institutions," added Grégory Claeys, a scholar at Bruegel, the Brussels think tank. According to Claeys, the author of a recent paper on the lessons from the euro crisis, these include the banking union and the way fiscal rules are implemented in the EU.

Some, however, worry that the creation of the EMF could serve as a pretext for the Germans to refuse any form of joint fiscal instrument in the future.

“It is impossible to envision a stable eurozone without that,” insists Shahin Vallée, an economist who was an adviser to former European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and to Macron when he was economy minister in François Hollande's government. By his own estimate, such a common budget should amount to at least 1 percent of the eurozone’s GDP — still way below Macron’s mooted plan.

The skeptics argue that whatever government takes over in Berlin after the election, there's little chance of a significant shift in the basic German position on the matter. They point out that original plans to complete the banking union with a joint bank deposit guarantee scheme have gone nowhere, because Germany balks at the potential risk of one day having to cover for other countries’ depositors.

Despite the hurdles, the Macron team remains hopeful about new Franco-German cooperation to reinvigorate the eurozone.

Referring to the eurozone's repeated bailout programs, the creation of the ESM, and the banking union, a presidential aide noted: “Look at the history of the euro crisis in the last 10 years and at all the reforms that Germany was supposed to never ever accept — and eventually did."