Berlin \u2013 <\/p>\n
Mediators tasked with salvaging the troubled European FCAS warplane program have failed to reach an agreement and produced separate final reports, the German press reported Saturday.<\/p>\n
The FCAS program is a flagship joint effort to build a next-generation combat aircraft between France, Germany and Spain, and is seen as a bellwether of European defense and security cooperation.<\/p>\n
But the multibillion-euro project has faltered as disagreements persist between France’s Dassault Aviation and Airbus, which represents Germany and Spain.<\/p>\n
In a last-ditch bid to rescue it, one mediator from France and one from Germany were tasked last month with coming up with proposals by the end of April.<\/p>\n
A German government source confirmed that the pair had submitted their reports and that Berlin “will discuss them with France in the coming days,” without commenting on the outcome.<\/p>\n
But according to a report in the Handelsblatt financial daily, the mediators \u2014 the ex-head of a German tankmaker and a former French defense executive \u2014 could not reach an agreement, even producing two different reports.<\/p>\n
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz will be briefed on the outcome soon and will then make a decision, before discussing the matter with French President Emmanuel Macron at an EU summit in Cyprus on Thursday and Friday, Handelsblatt said.<\/p>\n
Merz, who last month insisted he was determined to find a solution for the project, could still decide to try to push ahead with it.<\/p>\n
But calls have been growing even within his own CDU party to pull the plug.<\/p>\n
If the mediation fails to produce a workable result, then “FCAS, in its current form, has failed”, CDU lawmaker Volker Mayer-Lay said, adding that Germany and France should then focus on developing separate fighter jets.<\/p>\n
“The phase of hesitation must not drag on any longer,” he said.<\/p>\n
The FCAS program was launched in 2017 to replace the Rafale jet and the Eurofighter planes used by Germany and Spain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Berlin \u2013 Mediators tasked with salvaging the troubled European FCAS warplane program have failed to reach an agreement…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17020,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[367,4,12321,90,92,108],"class_list":{"0":"post-17019","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-europe","8":"tag-defense","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-fighter-jets","11":"tag-france","12":"tag-germany","13":"tag-spain"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17019\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}