PARIS — The collapse of a flagship Franco-German next-generation fighter jet program is providing France’s main far-right party with fresh ammunition to attack the European-oriented defense strategy of President Emmanuel Macron.
In line with a military vision centered on France’s domestic priorities, the National Rally argued for years that Paris should scrap the jet fighter project and claimed that Germany was looking to take advantage of the French arms industry.
Now that Berlin has pulled the plug, senior far-right officials are claiming they have been vindicated and are seeking to score political points from the demise of Macron’s integrationist dream, less than a year before a presidential election in which the National Rally is leading the polls.
“This is a failure for Franco-German cooperation but first and foremost, a personal failure for President Macron,” far-right leader Jordan Bardella said in an exclusive interview that will be released in its entirety Monday.
Launched in 2017 by Macron and then-Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Future Combat Air System was supposed to replace Germany’s Eurofighter and France’s Rafale jet in the 2040s. Spain later joined the program. The plan was to jointly develop a fighter jet and an entire networked system of drones, sensors and satellites linked together digitally.
This week, however, Berlin buried the project for good due to irreconcilable differences between France’s Dassault Aviation and Germany’s Airbus Defence and Space. The French warplane manufacturer wanted to take a leadership role in making the fighter but ran into opposition from Airbus, who refused to be treated as a subcontractor.
For the National Rally, the final blow coming from Germany feeds their long-running narrative that Berlin is looking to humiliate Paris.
If the far-right party wins the presidential election next year, defense policy is likely to be much more oriented toward core French defense priorities and domestic industry, deviating from Macron, who pushed for more European defense integration. The Elysée didn’t reply to a request for comment.
In recent years, National Rally lawmakers relentlessly (and unsuccessfully) put forward amendments to try and kill FCAS by depriving the program of funding. After FCAS collapsed, Laurent Jacobelli —a National Rally MP working on defense, who described the failure as “as predictable as it is inevitable” — said that, unlike Macron, his party would focus on French interests when in power.
Now, the National Rally is confident France can build its own next-generation fighter jet program alone, despite worries about ballooning costs. That echoes Dassault CEO Eric Trappier’s argument during FCAS talks that France doesn’t need a partner to make a fighter jet.
As Bardella put it in his interview: “I have complete confidence in our companies, Dassault has exceptional expertise.”
But the financial hurdles to going it alone are daunting.
“The National Rally operates on a form of reflexive anti-German sentiment that plays well with part of the electorate,” said Paul Maurice, an expert on Franco-German relations at the Paris-based IFRI think tank. “The [FCAS] collapse allows them to position themselves as the true champions of sovereignty. But it raises a budget question they have no answer to.”
Several senior National Rally officials told POLITICO the far-right party is not opposed to cooperation in principle. “Industrial partnerships will inevitably have to be considered,” Bardella said, mentioning deep-strike capabilities and air defense without naming countries. As an example of successful cooperation, he praised a recent agreement between Dassault and Germany’s OHB to make a space shuttle.
France can look beyond Europe to foster partnerships with countries such as India and the United Arab Emirates, said Frank Giletti, a National Rally lawmaker who sits in the National Assembly’s defense committee.
He insisted his party doesn’t have anything against Germany specifically, but added: “Let’s be honest. With the German drive to rearm— Rheinmetall, the €100 billion, their tanks, submarines, and maybe even aircraft manufacturing in the future— I’m not sure they see France as a partner for cooperation.”
Marion Solletty contributed to this report from Brussels.