WITH EMMANUEL Macron elected French president, and Angela Merkel now likely to be re-elected in the autumn in Germany, there is a growing sense that the crisis in the EU, triggered by Brexit, has passed.

It is not quite back to business as usual, but the threats to EU stability have receded. At the start of this year there was a real possibility of a right wing anti-EU Dutch politician winning the election. That did not happen, and we have now seen the end of pressure for a Frexit referendum. France and Germany will now again be the power brokers and policy setters of the EU – a task made a lot easier for them by Brexit.

It also seems that the attack dogs of the European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, have been put back in their kennels. It became clear after Juncker's anti-Theresa May comments that his views were not widely shared by the national leaders who are his bosses.

Unlike Juncker, they are pragmatists. They know they need to avoid a hard Brexit, in favour of a sensible settlement. Hopefully after the UK election in June, cool heads will prevail, allowing a return to the old Churchill maxim that jaw-jaw is preferable to war-war.

As Brexit looms larger it is moving up the political agenda in agriculture. In Germany the main farm union, the DBV, has warned that the member states of the EU-27 will have to dig deeper to maintain the CAP budget after the UK leaves. The DBV sees the UK contribution continuing until 2020, the end of the current CAP, even if Brexit happens in 2019. That should mean that the commitment to maintain UK farm support along EU lines until 2020 will be funded from Brussels.

That would make this a less sensitive issue with the Treasury. Beyond 2020, the simple question for the EU-27 will be whether to cut budgets or increase contributions, but by then the UK will be out of the equation.

The DBV says a hard Brexit must be avoided, because the EU-27 needs to be in a position to supply food to the UK market. The gap between food the UK sells to the EU-27 and buys from it is €4.7 billion a year. That is a market no-one is going to give up without a fight.

The countries in the firing line from a hard Brexit, which would see tariffs set at the World Trade Organisation levels, are Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands. Copa-Cogeca, the umbrella organisation for farm unions and cooperatives has also warned against a hard Brexit, claiming it would be a 'catastrophe' for European agriculture. This is a message farm lobby organisations in the EU 27 need to make sure their politicians take on board.

France is enamoured with its new president. Emmanuel Macron is the youngest ever French president, and that and his glamorous, if older, wife prompts comparison with JF Kennedy in the US or the current Canadian president, Justin Trudeau. Where Macron differs is that he is a political outsider.

In the event he beat his right wing challenger easily, and that will head off pressure in France for a vote on EU membership or membership of the euro. He and Angela Merkel will forge a strong alliance, and if the UK had not been leaving the EU it would have felt the effects of that powerful axis. When it comes to French farmers, who are always vociferous and expect much of their president, they now have one with no agricultural roots. However Macron is committed to delivering for rural France, knowing that la France profonde ultimately rallied to his cause to help beat Marine Le Pen.

The main French farm union has already set out a series of targets for the new president. Ironically they are keen that he should be more European and less nationalistic, believing isolation does not deliver as well for French farming as Brussels. That may be the official line, but there are plenty of radical agricultural groups that want him to secure a hard Brexit to keep UK farm products, like lamb, out of France.

That is unlikely, but regardless of the settlement reached it seems inevitable the future will bring French farmer opposition to imports from the UK. One big difference to now however is that if this is not adhered to there will no longer be recourse to the European Court for the UK after Brexit.