A European minimum wage, a unified social-security system and joint debt issuance are “the wrong track,” Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, a Merkel protegee who leads the governing Christian Democratic Union, said in an op-ed for Welt am Sonntag.

Creating a “common market for banks” would be worthwhile, she said.

The response from Berlin to French President Emmanuel Macron’s sweeping plans for strengthening the European Union is the latest sign that leaders of the EU’s two biggest powers differ in tone and substance on how to remedy the continent’s gloom.

While seeking to stop the advance of anti-EU nationalists, Macron’s manifesto would create several new agencies.

“Our Europe must get stronger,” but the answer can’t simply be to transfer powers away from the national and local levels, the newspaper quoted Kramp-Karrenbauer as saying.

In proposals more aligned with Macron, she said Europe needs a unified database for tracking immigration, “an accord on gapless border protection” and a European pact for climate protection, which would be hashed out by companies, employees and the public.

Macron’s blueprint for “European renewal” is part of a push by political leaders to blunt the appeal of populist parties, who are seeking to turn European Parliament elections across the EU in May into a referendum on their nationalist visions for the continent.

Kramp-Karrenbauer has laid down markers before.

Before CDU delegates elected her in December to succeed Merkel as party chairwoman, she courted German conservatives with a strident tone that departed from Merkel’s measured rhetoric.

“No matter how charming the French are – in France, it’s always and above all about French interests,” she said in November.