German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron have agreed to abandon a joint fighter jet programme due to long-running disagreements between the companies involved, the German government said on Monday.
The leaders "reached the shared assessment that the companies will not be able to come together on building a joint combat aircraft", a government official told French news agency AFP about the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project.
"They acknowledge this reality."
The FCAS programme was launched in 2017 to replace France's Rafale jets and the Eurofighter planes used by Germany and Spain.
But the project was beset by disagreements between the firms involved – France's Dassault Aviation and Airbus, which represents Germany and Spain.
Abandoning the project will come as a blow to efforts by European countries to cooperate more closely on defence and present a united front, as they contend with a hostile Russia and souring ties with the United States.
Despite the move to ditch the joint warplane, the German official said other parts of the wide-ranging project will continue.
"The actual core of FCAS is to be continued as a European system," the official said, describing it as a "nervous system that networks aircraft, drones, and other components into an integrated whole".
The French and German defence ministries are set to draw up a plan for defence cooperation "focused on a few realistic and relevant projects" at a forthcoming meeting, the official added.
Cédric Perrin, chief of the foreign affairs and defence committee at the French Senate, said that Macron "was the only one who still believed in the survival of FCAS".
"The sooner the decision is made, the less time we will waste moving on to the next phase," he told AFP.
Airbus and Dassault were not immediately available for comment.
The announcement comes despite calls for Europe to integrate its fragmented militaries more closely as geopolitical turmoil worsens.
Last-ditch efforts
Russia's war against Ukraine is in its fifth year, while European countries are increasingly worried about US security commitments to the continent under President Donald Trump.
There had been last-ditch efforts to salvage FCAS.
In March two mediators – one from France and one from Germany – were tasked with coming up with proposals to rescue the initiative.
But they were unable to do so, while the head of Dassault Aviation continued to insist that the firm could go it alone on the project and was not in favour of it being "co-managed".
The project's demise comes despite both Merz and Macron insisting publicly they were determined for it to succeed.
The German leader had said earlier this year that he would "do everything in my power, and fight until the very last moment, to get joint European projects off the ground here, and above all German-French projects".
Speaking in April after talks with Merz, Macron had denied the project was dead.
"We are continuing to move forward. Europe has never needed unity, greater independence and greater sovereignty more than it does now," he said.
(with AFP)
