Paris and Berlin abandon €100bn jet

For nine years, Germany and France tried to make a European promise fly. The joint sixth-generation fighter, estimated at €100 billion, was meant to replace both the Eurofighter and the Rafale by 2040 and show that European defence integration could produce aircraft, not just summit language. On June 8, Chancellor Merz and President Macron formally ended it.

The cause was not a sudden shift in geopolitics or a budget crisis. It was more basic. Dassault Aviation and Airbus Defence, the two companies expected to build the plane, compete against each other for export customers. The technology each side was being asked to share was also the technology that makes its aircraft valuable.

For Irish readers, used to hearing EU defence discussed through the lens of neutrality and sovereignty, the lesson is blunt enough: European defence integration is not just about political will. It is about who owns the intellectual property, who controls the design, and who gets to sell the finished machine.

European combat aviation now breaks into at least three tracks. None offers what the Future Combat Air System, or FCAS, was supposed to deliver: one platform backed by pooled industrial weight.

Why Two Companies Couldn't Build One Plane

The row was commercial before it became political. Dassault builds the Rafale and sells it to India, Greece, Egypt and the Gulf states. Airbus competes for some of the same customers through the Eurofighter consortium. Sharing flight-control software, stealth architecture and sensor-fusion logic would mean "arming a rival on the same tenders".

The governance made it worse. Dassault had the title of prime contractor for the fighter, but Airbus represented both Germany and Spain, two of the three governments paying for the programme. In every formal vote, Dassault was outnumbered. Its chief executive, Eric Trappier, put it plainly: "In votes I always lose. I am one against two."

There was no binding arbitration system to settle disputes. Each disagreement moved from engineers to ministers to heads of state. The French defence site Opex360 described it as a programme "married without a marriage contract".

A final attempt at mediation in spring 2026 produced two separate reports with incompatible conclusions. Merz told Macron the companies would never agree. Macron accepted it.

Three Tracks Replace One Programme

GCAP — the Global Combat Air Programme between the UK, Italy and Japan — is now the only sixth-generation fighter project with functioning governance and a demonstrator on course for late 2027. Its joint venture, Edgewing, divides ownership equally between BAE Systems, Leonardo and Japan's JAIEC, with a single design authority. That is the structural feature FCAS never had.

Italy alone has committed €18.6 billion. Germany sounded out Rome about joining as early as January 2026, but Berlin wants Airbus to co-lead any future fighter programme. That condition does not fit easily with Edgewing's existing structure. Japan has resisted adding new development partners, pointing to the risk of delay to the 2035 timetable and concerns about information security.

Germany's more likely route is a separate Airbus-led programme, possibly with Spain and Sweden's Saab. Airbus Defence chief executive Michael Schöllhorn has confirmed "productive but confidential" talks with Stockholm, though Saab's chief executive has stressed that no formal negotiations are under way.

France will go by itself. Dassault has funding for the Rafale F5 upgrade and for a stealth drone derived from its nEUROn demonstrator. That is familiar ground for Paris. In 1985, France left the Eurofighter consortium and produced the Rafale independently.

Spain, the third FCAS partner, is left in the weakest position. Madrid rejected the F-35 on sovereignty grounds, has no seat at the GCAP table, and is exploring preliminary talks with Turkey about its unfinished KAAN fighter.

The Forty-Year Loop

The pattern is old. In 1985, France demanded industrial primacy in what became the Eurofighter, was refused, walked away and built the Rafale alone. The same structural problem has returned: companies that compete in export markets cannot easily share the intellectual property that gives them their edge.

The EU-level problem is sharper now. European defence instruments such as EDIP, the new defence industry programme, and SAFE, the €150 billion loan facility for defence investment, were built around EU-headquartered programmes. The only working sixth-generation fighter project now runs through Reading and Tokyo.

If Germany eventually joins GCAP, two of the EU's three largest defence spenders would operate an aircraft whose design authority sits outside the Union. Belgium has already drawn its own conclusion, ordering additional F-35s as soon as FCAS was declared dead.

For nine years, Berlin, Paris and Madrid agreed on the destination: a European fighter built by European industry. What they never settled was the part that matters in any industrial alliance: who leads, who follows, and who gets to sell the result.