Those moves come as France, Germany and the eurozone produced unexpectedly good economic figures, outstripping the US and Japan in the second quarter of this year. Does this suggest that both countries have a new political and economic weight?

If only that were more solidly true. Both Germany and France have failed to make the economic reforms — particularly of the rules for employing workers — that would secure them longer-term growth.

The new confidence that both governments are showing on the world stage is invisible at home. Plagued by infighting, harassed by lobbies, they are unable to put into practice their pledges of reform.

Still, credit where it’s due: Monday’s figures for eurozone growth were much better than the markets were expecting, particularly those for Germany. But export growth was one strong feature of those figures, and it is expected now to slow down. Germany has been the world’s biggest exporter of goods for the past three years, a title its ministers cite with pride — and some defensiveness — in trying to gloss over unemployment of more than 10 per cent, and in trying to coax trade unions to accept reforms.

But the BGA exporters’ association predicted that although export growth might reach 10 per cent this year it would be slower next year.

For years, analysts have worried that Germany has been able to maintain these exports only by outsourcing some of the manufacture to cheaper countries, such as Poland and Hungary, and then re-exporting goods under a “Made in Germany” label. Its successful export industries, critics point out, are largely the same as 40 years ago.

The implication is that Germany has been failing to push through the underlying reforms of its businesses that would ensure their long-term competitiveness.

Yet optimists about Germany’s economic potential have argued that German business was beginning to force through those changes, in individual deals with the unions and employees, where politicians have been unable to.

Last year’s election of Angela Merkel, as Germany’s first woman Chancellor presiding over a “grand coalition” of her own conservative Christian Democrats and the centre-left Social Democrats, offered businesses the hope of more pro-market reform.

But this summer, business has fallen out of love with her. The grand coalition has been paralysed by the most reactionary elements of Left and Right.

“In the course of its work up until now, the Government has not created a basis for growth and employment,” Anton Börner, the BGA president, said. “Hence the upswing will break off in 2007.” Businesses have been appalled that the Government may introduce a tax on interest, offsetting a much-trumpeted cut in the corporate tax rate.

The Government has looked more agile in drafting new healthcare laws, proposing to merge seven health insurance federations, to their dismay.

But business leaders are right that this amounts to far less than the radical, pro-market changes that Merkel pledged at the Leipzig congress of December 2003, which led to her being dubbed “Germany’s Margaret Thatcher”, although the label never looked a good fit.

In France household spending helped to push growth ahead. But as in Germany it comes against a background of stubbornly high unemployment (9.3 per cent of the working population).

The Government has been able to push through some small reforms, such as relaxing the law restricting the working week to 35 hours. But the attempt earlier this year by Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, to make it easier for businesses to sack young employees brought riots, and a plunge in his reputation, which Lebanon has only partly repaired.

In a week of good news in the eurozone, against the background of a slowing US economy, it would be churlish to strike up the old lament of eurosclerosis. But all the same, the fundamental problems in the eurozone’s largest economies are barely budging.

There must be a suspicion that, for France and Germany, foreign policy offers a welcome diversion. The Lebanon crisis allows them to make a dramatic return to the centre stage of diplomacy. Their efforts to sort out that turmoil may be more popular with their citizens than those to push through uncomfortable changes at home.

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