Paris and Berlin scrap €100bn jet

For nine years, Germany and France tried to build a joint sixth-generation fighter jet: a €100 billion programme meant to replace the Eurofighter and the Rafale by 2040, and to show that European defence integration could deliver machinery, not only summit language. On June 8, Chancellor Merz and President Macron formally ended it.

The reason was not Ukraine, public debt, or a sudden loss of political will. It was the old European problem: industrial sovereignty sounds clean in a communiqué, but the companies asked to share the crown jewels were direct competitors. Dassault Aviation and Airbus Defence both sell combat aircraft. Neither could hand over the flight-control software, stealth design, and sensor logic that make those aircraft worth buying.

For Malta, this is not a procurement story. Malta is not shopping for sixth-generation fighters. It is a story about what happens when EU defence money, national champions, and sovereignty rhetoric collide. European combat aviation now splits into at least three tracks. None offers what the Future Combat Air System, FCAS, promised: one European platform backed by pooled industrial weight.

Why Two Companies Couldn't Build One Plane

The dispute was commercial before it became political. Dassault builds the Rafale and sells it to India, Greece, Egypt, and Gulf states. Airbus competes for some of the same orders through the Eurofighter consortium. Sharing the technology behind the aircraft would mean "arming a rival on the same tenders".

The governance made the commercial problem worse. Dassault was named prime contractor for the fighter, but Airbus represented both Germany and Spain, two of the three paying governments. In practice, Dassault had the title, while Airbus had the numbers. CEO Eric Trappier put it plainly: "In votes I always lose. I am one against two."

There was no binding arbitration mechanism to settle disputes. Every technical disagreement moved from engineers to ministers, then to heads of government. The French defence site Opex360 described the programme as "married without a marriage contract".

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

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 working governance and a demonstrator scheduled for late 2027. Its joint venture, Edgewing, divides ownership equally between BAE Systems, Leonardo, and Japan's JAIEC. It also has a single design authority, the structural feature FCAS never had.

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

Germany's more plausible route is now a separate Airbus-led programme, possibly with Spain and Sweden's Saab. Airbus Defence CEO Michael Schöllhorn confirmed "productive but confidential" talks with Stockholm. Saab's CEO, however, stressed that formal negotiations have not begun.

France will go alone. Dassault already has funding for the Rafale F5 upgrade and for a stealth drone derived from its nEUROn demonstrator. This is familiar French ground. In 1985, France left the Eurofighter consortium and built the Rafale independently.

Spain, the third FCAS partner, loses most clearly. Madrid rejected the F-35 on sovereignty grounds, has no place at the GCAP table, and is exploring preliminary talks with Turkey over its unfinished KAAN fighter.

The Forty-Year Loop

The pattern is almost unchanged from 1985. France wanted industrial primacy in what became the Eurofighter. It was refused, walked away, and built the Rafale alone. The same structural problem has returned: companies that compete for export orders cannot easily share the intellectual property that gives them their edge.

The EU-level problem is now sharper. European defence instruments such as EDIP, the new defence industry programme, and SAFE, the €150 billion loan facility for defence investment, were designed to support EU-headquartered programmes. Yet the only functioning sixth-generation fighter track 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 made its choice, ordering additional F-35s as soon as FCAS was declared dead.

For small member states, including Malta, this matters because EU defence integration is increasingly being built through industrial instruments and common financing, not only through military alliances. The question is who controls the technology bought with that money, and whether smaller countries are funding European autonomy or another round of national-champion bargaining.

For nine years, Berlin, Paris, and Madrid agreed on the destination: a European fighter built by European industry. They never settled the questions that mattered most: who leads, who follows, and who gets to sell the result.