Chancellor Friedrich Merz has vowed to make Germany a European leader in civil and military aviation to “secure our sovereignty”.
The vow comes two days after the German leader pulled the plug on a decade-old consortium with France and Spain to build a new European fighter jet, citing irrevocable differences between the key partners.
“We’re resolving a long blockage with this decision, but we’re also opening up new opportunities for the industry to make progress in the construction of modern fighter jets in other ways,” said Merz at the ILA air show outside Berlin.
The €100 billion Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project, to develop a successor to the Eurofighter, ground to a halt after feuding between France’s Dassault Aviation and the German defence division of Franco-German aviation firm Airbus.
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After months of standstill and unsuccessful political mediation, Merz conceded on Wednesday that Dassault and Airbus had been “unable to find common ground”.
He expressed hope of salvaging “the real core of FCAS”, the software system designed for co-ordinated battles in the sky, known as the combat cloud.
Looking to the future, Merz said Germany’s effective blank cheque on military spending would translate into a new focus from Berlin on strategic security.
“Above all in aviation and space travel, we have to strengthen key competences and future-oriented technologies,” he said.
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After finishing his address at the ILA air show in Berlin Schönefeld, Merz visited the stand of US defence contractor Lockheed Martin.
German defence minister Boris Pistorius has indicated he might be open to stepping up the country’s current order of 35 F-35s by another 45, in part to make up for the FCAS collapse.
Rather than lick its wounds, Michael Schoellhorn, chief executive of Airbus Defence and Space, asked Merz for an expedited decision on how to proceed now with a next-generation European fighter jet.
“We’re standing ready to take on responsibility,” he said. “We have the expertise, the technology, the capacities and a clear will to develop and build the fighter jet of the sixth generation.”
The company has already pitched to the federal government a replacement defence aircraft consortium with German firms, including Diehl Defence, Hensoldt, Liebherr and Rohde & Schwarz.
Speaking at ILA, Schoellhorn insisted he was not pursuing a German-lead approach, with reports of approaches to Spain and Sweden. Rather than an Airbus-lead plan, an alternative could be for Germany to come on board a separate, sixth-generation fighter project lead by Britain, Italy and Japan.
An acrimonious break-up with its French partner appeared inevitable after the French company’s chief executive Éric Trappier accused Airbus in public of “not wanting to work with” Dassault Aviation.
Airbus executives insist the problem was Trappier, describing him as a mercurial figure whose public professions of partnership were at odds with private demands for subservience from partners.
