France and Germany say goodbye to the joint jet project

The German Chancellor, Friedrich Merzand the French president, Emmanuel Macronhave agreed on the suspension of the European project Scaf for the fighter jet. The Berlin government made this known. “The French president and the German chancellor have come to the shared conclusion that the companies (Airbus and Dassault Aviation, ed.) cannot reach an agreement on the construction of a joint combat aircraft,” explained a German government source.

The abandonment of the project represents a serious blow to European efforts to strengthen the defense cooperation. The program Future Combat Air System (FCAS) it was launched in 2017 to replace the French Rafales and the Eurofighters supplied to Germany and Spain. The project was seen as a key testbed for closer defense collaboration, in an effort to present a united front in the face of a hostile Russia, at a time of tensions with the United States.

The future of the FCAS project

The German government official who announced the decision of Merz and Macron stressed, however, that other parts of the broad project will continue. “The core of the FCAS will continue to be a European system,” he said, “which functions as a nervous system that connects aircraft, drones and other components into an integrated whole.”

New cooperation plans

The French and German defense ministries will draw up a plan defense cooperation “focused on some realistic and relevant projects” in an upcoming meeting. There were last minute attempts to save the project. In March, two mediators – one French and one German – were tasked with drawing up proposals to save the initiative. They didn’t succeed, also because the head of Dassault Aviation he continued to insist that the company could carry out the project independently and did not need “co-management”.

The signs of crisis

The determination with which Merz had said at the beginning of the year that he would “do everything possible and fight until the last moment to get joint European projects, and especially Franco-German ones, off the ground” was already a sign that something was not going right. As late as July, Macron denied that the project was shelved. “We continue to move forward. Europe has never needed unity, greater independence and greater sovereignty than now,” he said.