France and Germany have formally abandoned their flagship joint military aircraft programme, the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), after years of deadlock between the industrial partners tasked with building it. German government officials confirmed that Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron had "reached the shared assessment that the companies will not be able to come together on building a joint combat aircraft" and had chosen to "acknowledge this reality."

Launched in 2017 under Macron and then-Chancellor Angela Merkel, the FCAS programme was designed to develop a next-generation sixth-generation fighter jet to replace France's Rafale aircraft and the Eurofighter used by Germany and Spain, with an operational target of around 2040. The estimated cost of the full programme ran to roughly €100 billion. At its core was an unresolved dispute between France's Dassault Aviation and the European aerospace giant Airbus, which represented German and Spanish industrial interests. Dassault insisted on acting as lead partner and retaining control over its intellectual property and established supply chains — its CEO reportedly telling French parliamentarians he would not be instructed by the Germans on how to build fighter jets. Airbus, in turn, pushed for a more equal partnership with substantial technology transfers. The two governments were also at odds over the aircraft's design specifications: France required a jet capable of carrying nuclear weapons and landing on aircraft carriers, requirements Germany did not share.

Two mediators, one from each country, were appointed in March in a last-ditch effort to salvage the project, but they were unable to bridge the gap. Despite both Merz and Macron making repeated public pledges of commitment to FCAS — Macron was still denying the project was dead as recently as April — the announcement was made on the sidelines of an EU–Western Balkans summit in Montenegro. Catherine Hoeffler, a professor of European studies at the University of Geneva who specialises in defence economics, described the collapse as symptomatic of a deeper structural problem: both sides wanted to profit from collaboration without yielding their own technology or suppliers to the other, and the political will to override those industrial interests ultimately proved insufficient.

Not all elements of FCAS are being scrapped. German officials stressed that the broader "nervous system" component — a secure combat data cloud intended to network aircraft, drones, and other assets into an integrated whole — may continue as a European project. France and Germany's defence ministries are expected to agree a revised cooperation agenda focused on "a few realistic and relevant projects" at an upcoming meeting. Still, the collapse of the fighter jet itself is widely seen as a significant setback for European defence ambitions at a particularly fraught moment: Russia's war in Ukraine is entering its fifth year, and European governments are increasingly anxious about the reliability of US security guarantees under President Donald Trump. As Hoeffler noted, despite those pressures, Europe's defence industries remain deeply fragmented — and she expressed scepticism that cooperation would meaningfully improve in the near term.