Follow us

BlueSky | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Twitch | Youtube

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading articles written by high-level experts, then make sure to support the publication by liking, subscribing, and sharing it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

This week

• ⚽French World Cup ends alongside Deschamps’ career

• ✈️The FCAS post-mortem

• ⚖️Philippe whistleblower protected by courts

• ❓Lecornu as a surprise presidential candidate?

⛱️TFD goes on summer break

Right, as always, your favourite newsletter will be going off for a summer break to rest and recharge after a long year of geopolitical instability, and ahead of what will quite frankly be a crazy 2027 French Presidential Election.

So, expect one or two odd articles here and there, but otherwise, have a great summer and remember to subscribe to TFD.

✈️The FCAS post-mortem

Earlier this week, I released an in-depth analysis of the FCAS scandal that will hamstring European defence for years.

The €100 billion Franco-German-Spanish fighter jet was formally killed off on 8 June, but the reality is that this wasn't really a breakdown of the project so much as a political manoeuvre: Airbus had a full replacement consortium, complete with partner list, position paper and concept video, ready within 48 hours of the cancellation, which doesn't happen by accident.

I went through the IP fight between Dassault and Airbus, fact-checked the "80% workshare" claim that was spread through German media to attack the French portion of the project, and traced a Handelsblatt column blaming Dassault right back to the same executive who unveiled Germany's Plan B four months later.

The bigger point: this is what happens when two governments and two rival companies are told to cooperate on a continental-scale programme with nothing above them to make that cooperation binding, and when bad-faith actors can continue unpunished

⚽French World Cup run ends alongside Deschamps’ Career

So, that’s it, folks, the World Cup has come to an end for the French national team, ending in a 4-6 defeat against England in a thrilling, but mixed 3rd place game where France apparently only woke up and decided to play in the second half.

But even sadder for French football fans was that last night marked the end of Didier Deschamps' career with l’Equipe de France after 25 years wearing our kit, having represented France 103 times as a player between 1989 and 2000, and managing our team from 2012 onwards. He was also the third man to win the World Cup as both a player and a manager.

However, there were some good notes, with the game seeing the highest number of goals scored in this competition, and Michael Olise marking World Cup history by recording the most assists in a single tournament.

On top of that, Kylian Mbappe earned the record for all-time goal scorer in World Cup history with 22 goals across three World Cups at the age of 27, and to top it off, he has moved ahead of Lionel Messi in the race for the 2026 Golden Boot.

⚖️Philippe whistleblower protected by courts

So, moving back to the politics of it all:

The Paris administrative tribunal has upheld the whistleblower status of the former Le Havre communauté urbaine employee whose report triggered the PNF investigation into Édouard Philippe.

In a judgment dated 15 July, the tribunal rejected Le Havre Seine Métropole’s bid to have the Défenseur des droits’ opinion annulled, ordering the authority Philippe presides over to pay 1,800 euros in costs to its former employee.

The case centres on a 2020 convention between Philippe and Stéphanie de Bazelaire, then his deputy for innovation and digital affairs, governing the animation of the Cité numérique du Havre and public subsidies routed through the LH French Tech association.

Alongside Philippe, the investigation also names de Bazelaire and Claire-Sophie Tasias, the communauté urbaine’s former director general of services. Philippe, mayor of Le Havre and a declared 2027 candidate, denies any wrongdoing and maintains he is “innocent.”

For some background, I covered the story earlier this year:

“Judith,” the whistleblower’s pseudonym, first reported the matter to the Parquet national financier in September 2023, prompting searches at the mairie and communauté urbaine headquarters in April 2024.

The civil-party complaint was filed on 19 June 2025, citing workplace harassment alongside the financial charges, though only misappropriation of public funds, favouritism, unlawful conflict of interest and extortion by a public official have been carried through into the formal investigation.

The PNF closed its preliminary probe on 3 March 2026 and issued a réquisitoire introductif on 7 May, the formal charging request that assigns an investigating judge, opening the judicial investigation that now formally encompasses Judith’s own complaint.

“Judith’s” lawyer, Jérôme Karsenti, told AFP that she is “looking forward to being heard” by the investigating judge. Meanwhile, on the other side, Philippe’s team said he learned of the investigation’s opening through the press and that he will “of course answer all the questions justice puts to him.”

While you would think this situation would heap pressure on the presidential candidate, currently competing with Gabriel Attal to succeed Emmanuel Macron in the centre, the candidate seems relatively unfazed. Philippe said in late May that he would remain a candidate even if placed under formal investigation.

The tribunal’s ruling settles a procedural skirmish, leaving the substance of the allegations untouched, but stripping Philippe’s camp of one avenue it could have used to contest the case’s legitimacy before the charges were dropped on his and his campaign’s head.

The PNF opened this case the same week it opened a separate recel inquiry into Dominique de Villepin, another declared 2027 hopeful, over a gifted statuette and bust.

So if you would like a scorecard, we currently have two presidential contenders who carry active PNF files heading into the same campaign, while a third, Marine Le Pen, is a convicted criminal.

And we say French politics is boring

❓Lecornu as a surprise presidential candidate?

Just when you thought the centre-right’s presidential psychodrama couldn’t get more absurd, an Odoxa-Backbone poll for Le Figaro found that Renaissance sympathisers rate Sébastien Lecornu, the French Prime Minister who keeps insisting he isn’t running, above both Édouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, who are.

Run on 15-16 July among a representative sample of 1,005 people, the poll found that 59% of Renaissance sympathisers believe that Lecornu would make a better candidate than Attal, and 57% preferring him to Philippe.

With both candidates attempting to find their voices and their place in the presidential contest, we have to admit that neither man is faring particularly well with his own base or the wider electorate, if you look at the ongoing polls, which says less about Lecornu than about the two of them.

Nationally, the story flips. Only 22% of French people rate Lecornu as a good candidate at all, and the wider public barely distinguishes between him and his rivals: 38% would take him over Attal, 37% over Philippe, numbers close enough to be statistical noise rather than a mandate.

The rest of the poll is not exactly a pep talk for anyone in the race. 44% of French people can’t spontaneously name anyone they’d like to see elected president, and only 43% of respondents name someone who’s actually declared.

Regardless of the ongoing judicial issues, Marine Le Pen tops the list, cited by 18% of respondents, up 8 points. Philippe and Jean-Luc Mélenchon tie for second on 7% each, while Gabriel Attal was mentioned by only 2%, barely beating out the far-right Sarah Knafo.

Odoxa also tested a dozen “alternative” figures, none of whom cracked 23% approval as a potential candidate. Michel-Édouard Leclerc, the supermarket boss, topped that particular non-podium, just ahead of Lecornu and Gérald Darmanin, both on 22%.

Perhaps the most telling number: 66% of French people think a Renaissance-PS alliance would be a bad idea. But among the two electorates who’d actually have to live with it, 73% of Renaissance sympathisers and 54% of Socialists rather like it.

Read together with Lecornu’s numbers, the message from the centre and centre-left isn’t “give us a candidate”, it’s almost a cry of “give us anyone else.”

Thank you for reading the French Dispatch! If you liked what you read, you should like this post and subscribe to the newsletter by clicking/tapping the button below:

Subscribe now

And if you’d like to contribute a coffee or two to help fuel my coverage of the wild world of politics, feel free to click on the picture below:

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading articles written by high-level experts, then make sure to support the publication by liking, subscribing, and sharing it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

There is a maquette of the FCAS sitting quietly somewhere in Paris. The sleek grey model of a sixth-generation fighter, photographed at the Élysée on a cold January morning in 2023, flanked by Macron and Scholz. Sadly, on 8 June, it became nothing more than a gravestone for European independence.

The German government confirmed that Chancellor Friedrich Merz had recommended to Emmanuel Macron that the two countries abandon the Système de Combat Aérien du Futur (SCAF), known in English as the Future Combat Air System (FCAS). This joint Franco-German-Spanish programme was supposed to replace the Rafale, the Eurofighter, and Spain’s contribution to the Eurofighter fleet by 2040.

At an estimated cost of nearly 100 billion euros, it was the most ambitious industrial cooperation project Europe had ever launched and was seen as the future of European strategic autonomy. Yet, by the end it was treated as an afterthought: Merz conveyed the decision to Macron on June 6 on the sidelines of the EU-Western Balkans summit in Montenegro, the news broke publicly on 8 June, and Merz confirmed it from the podium two days after that at the opening of ILA Berlin, the same air show where the SCAF partnership between Dassault and Airbus was formally unveiled in 2018. The programme ended where it began.

The fighter jet is dead. The “combat cloud” and drone systems will apparently be allowed to stagger on under the SCAF name, in what one European source described to Reuters as a “face-saving solution.” It is a fig leaf, not a programme.

This is not a surprise. It is, however, a verdict. And the more closely you read the months that led to the announcement, the less it looks like a breakdown and the more it looks like a manoeuvre, one that Germany and Airbus had prepared while publicly blaming the French for the wreckage.

What Europe thought it was building

The programme launched in July 2017 was not, strictly speaking, just a fighter jet. It was a ‘system of systems’: a “combat cloud,” a network of interconnected drones, new weapons, unified communications architecture, and at its centre a next-generation manned aircraft called the Next Generation Fighter (NGF).

Rather than Europe’s two main air powers flying into the 2040s in separate national silos, they would field a single integrated combat architecture. European, sovereign, built from within.

2017 was the high point of a certain version of European ambition. Macron had just won the presidency on an explicitly pro-European platform. Merkel was in her final term, still commanding. The Franco-German engine, long stalled, appeared to be firing again. FCAS was its most spectacular output: proof that Europe could sustain the full spectrum of military capability without dependence on Washington. Spain joined in 2019. The budget estimate reached 100 billion euros. Defence ministers posed for photographs. And analysts, almost immediately, began to worry.

They were right to. By the time the programme was cancelled, roughly 3.4 billion euros had already been committed across its first two research phases, around 155 million for Phase 1A in 2020 and 3.2 billion for Phase 1B signed at the end of 2022. Not a single airworthy demonstrator had been built. Nine years and several billion euros bought a software backbone, an engine programme, and a model on a plinth.

So what exactly went wrong?

They were never going to be able to build it together, and both sides knew it early

Dassault Aviation and Airbus were not natural partners. They were, and remain, direct competitors. Dassault makes the Rafale, Airbus makes the Eurofighter. Asking them to jointly design, build, and share intellectual property on a single aircraft was asking two rival carmakers to build one car together, then sell it to their respective national champions.

Dassault, which has built every French combat aircraft since the Liberation, insisted on operational leadership of the NGF. Eric Trappier, the Dassault CEO, was explicit: “to be effective, you need a real leader.” He wanted final authority over the aircraft’s specifications and its supply chain, and he suspected Airbus of wanting to use FCAS as a vehicle for absorbing French combat aviation expertise it did not possess.

The programme’s design architecture, mapped in a 2020 analysis by the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), the German government’s own foreign policy think tank, shows precisely why that tension was inevitable. FCAS was built around seven pillars: aircraft, engine, remote carrier, cloud solutions, simulation, sensors, and stealth.

Across five of them, Airbus held either the key partner or associate partner role. But on the aircraft pillar, the NGF itself, the programme’s heart and by far its largest budget item, Airbus was merely the associate, under Dassault’s lead.

Germany had been handed principal responsibility for everything surrounding the plane: the drones, the combat cloud, the stealth integration, but France controlled the plane itself.

On paper, a careful division of labour. In practice, a permanent argument about whose contribution was worth more.

Airbus Defence and Space had no independent history of designing or building a combat fighter from scratch. The Eurofighter programme was led by BAE Systems and Alenia. Critics argued the German side wanted access to Dassault’s avionics and flight-control know-how without bringing equivalent expertise to the table.

Naturally, Airbus pushed back. Michael Schoellhorn, head of the Airbus Defence and Space division, told Le Monde that Dassault was trying to impose black boxes and unilateral intellectual property rules that would reduce Airbus to a mere supplier and cut its powerful German aerospace partners out of the programme’s core value.

The SWP analysis, published when the programme was still formally on track, carried a subtitle that now reads as a warning issued too early to be heeded: different perceptions and high complexity threatening the success of the strategic armaments project.

What Schoellhorn’s framing omits is what Airbus was actually asking for, and luckily for us, Aerotime’s reporting from 2021 to 2022 establishes the specific demands: Germany and Airbus required final say over the NGF’s flight controls, cockpit, and stealth capability, systems at the technical core of the aircraft and assigned to Dassault as prime contractor.

They pushed for IP rights to be shared within the NGF pillar so that each partner could use the jointly developed technology in future national programmes. Germany’s own Luftwaffe chief of staff, Ingo Gerhartz, made the intent explicit: “It should be possible to hand intellectual property rights from one branch of industry to the other so that all partners can make their own developments in the future.”

Trappier’s response was direct: “If I give my background today and the program is cancelled in two years, how would I be protected from the competition?” This was not a paranoid reading of Airbus’s intentions. It was an accurate one.

The governance asymmetry that enabled the IP dispute had a specific cause: Spain. Trappier told the French Senate’s defence committee in March 2021 that Spain’s accession had fundamentally changed the programme’s leadership structure. When FCAS launched in 2017 as a bilateral project, France led. When Spain joined in 2019 through Airbus Defence and Space, Airbus came to represent a larger portion of the conglomerate that the three partner nations formed in the programme.

Trappier acknowledged the consequence directly in his March 2026 earnings briefing: Dassault accepted a shift to a one-third share of the work when Spain joined.

Flight Global reported in June 2022 that, in cases of disagreement, matters were sent to all three procurement agencies, and Airbus, representing two of them, held a structural majority weight against Dassault, which represented one. Trappier’s “co-co-co” complaint was not mere vanity. It described a real governance problem: a prime contractor that could be outvoted by its own associate partner.

The wrong aircraft for the wrong war

The industrial dispute was corrosive enough on its own. Underneath it ran a more fundamental problem that neither government wanted to name.

In a February 2026 interview, Merz finally said what nobody in polite diplomatic circles had wanted to say: “The French need, in the next generation of fighter jets, an aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons and operating from an aircraft carrier. That’s not what we currently need in the German military.” France’s requirements were always specific.

The NGF had to be carrier-capable, for the future nuclear-powered France Libre, formally named and approved for construction in early 2026, and able to carry the French nuclear deterrent. Germany had bought 35 F-35As to serve as its dual-capable aircraft (DCA), the NATO term for a conventional fighter certified to deliver American B61 nuclear bombs under the alliance’s nuclear-sharing arrangement. That is a fundamentally different requirement from France’s.

Germany needed a land-based jet to carry someone else’s weapons under American authorisation; France needed a carrier-borne aircraft to carry its own. The two countries were, in a basic sense, designing different aircraft with different jobs, and they probably always knew it.

When Merz finally acknowledged this publicly, Belgian defence minister Theo Francken said what everyone was thinking, posting on X: “SCAF is dead. There will be no Franco-German sixth-generation fighter jet.”

The long goodbye

What followed was a prolonged diplomatic hospice, not a recovery effort.

Phase 2 of the programme, which would have moved the project from paper to metal via physical demonstrators, was due to be signed off by the end of 2025. It was not. The German chancellery confirmed in January 2026 that the decision had been postponed again. Without demonstrators, the cost and risk of every subsequent validation step increases. The programme was becoming progressively more expensive to continue and progressively less credible to back.

Macron launched a mediation effort in March, accepted by Merz, with a deadline of late April. The mediation collapsed on April 18. The German mediator concluded that a jointly built crewed fighter was no longer feasible. France’s defence minister, Catherine Vautrin, reported that mediators were requesting a ten-day extension.

Even that produced nothing.

By April 22, Trappier formally announced that negotiations with Airbus Defence and Space over the NGF were finished. He had warned earlier that month that only “two to three weeks” remained to save the programme. According to Handelsblatt, Merz personally attempted in those final weeks to persuade Trappier to accept an equal partnership with Airbus. That effort also failed.

Paul Taylor, senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre in Brussels, told Breaking Defense in February that the programme had been finished for a year or two already: “It’s been clear for a year or two that FCAS is dead, it just won’t lie down, because it’s a political project.” What was unfolding, he said, was “a very slow motion strip tease,” each stage of admission prolonged to avoid the political cost of a clean announcement.

The political cost arrived at ILA Berlin on June 10. Merz, speaking at the same venue where the programme had been launched eight years earlier, said cancelling FCAS “clears a long-standing obstacle” and “opens up new opportunities for the industry to make further progress in the development of modern fighter aircraft by exploring alternative approaches.”

Translation: watch what Berlin does next.

The cast of interests

To understand why FCAS died, follow the incentives rather than the press releases. Once you do, the collapse stops looking like a tragic failure of European will and starts looking like the rational outcome of three governments and two companies each pursuing what suited them.

Élie Tenenbaum, director of the security studies centre at IFRI, put the underlying asymmetry plainly: “While French manufacturer Dassault has the industrial know-how to build the plane, France does not have the resources to pay for it. Germany has the money and can work with others to plug the holes in industrial competency.” Neither side had an interest in a compromise that the other could accept.

Dassault’s exposure to failure was limited, and that shaped everything. If the NGF fell apart, Paris would eventually need a new combat aircraft. There is only one firm in France capable of building it. Dassault would receive the contract on its own terms. The Rafale’s export record helped: Egypt, Qatar, India, Greece, Croatia, the UAE, and Indonesia.

It was no longer the isolated manufacturer of the 2000s struggling to sell against the F-16. Trappier had even suggested a nationally developed successor could cost under 50 billion euros, roughly half the FCAS estimate. That path is now confirmed: Dassault will develop France’s next fighter alone, on a funded Rafale F5 baseline, with nuclear certification and carrier compatibility non-negotiable. Trappier told the Senate on 1 July that he expects the F5 development contract before the end of the year, and he left the door open to partners outside the old consortium. Analysts have pointed to Saab.

Run that figure properly, though, and it is not the bargain it sounds. France was carrying about a third of FCAS, call it thirty-three billion euros. A sovereign successor at fifty billion is carried by France and nobody else. Paris ends up paying roughly half as much again, for an aircraft with no partners, no shared production run, and no one to split the export market with. Dassault takes all of the work instead of a third of it. France pays more and gets less. The firm wins and the country loses.

Nor is it a costless victory for Dassault. It now depends on a French state finding fifty billion euros on its own, in the political weather of 2027, for a programme three countries were supposed to fund between them. Tenenbaum’s warning cuts both ways.

None of which makes Dassault the author of this. Trappier defended a contract that had named him prime contractor, and he gave ground where he could, accepting a cut to a third of the work when Spain joined. He sits as a subcontractor to Airbus on the Eurodrone and has said plainly that it does not trouble him. Refusing to be demoted out of a role the contract had already granted him is not obstruction. Preparing your replacement while the mediators are still in the room is something else entirely.

The 2027 election hung over all of this, though not in the way Berlin found it convenient to suggest. Trappier reportedly noted that after the election Macron would no longer be there to defend the programme, a clear warning to everyone involved. Macron was a strong supporter of the F5, fought for FCAS, and launched the mediation himself. He is the most dependable backer of French combat aviation and European strategic autonomy to date, and potentially ever will be.

What follows him is a wrecked fiscal position on one side and open hostility to arms exports on the other, and the export book is the thing keeping Dassault solvent. Bardella and Mélenchon both sided with Dassault in the industrial dispute. Neither would be the slightest use to it in office.

Germany’s calculus was equally rational. Berlin had the F-35 for its nuclear mission. None of the alternatives it might pursue, GCAP, a Saab partnership, or extending the shelf-life of the Eurofighter, required managing the relationship with Dassault. The incentive to keep FCAS alive was, for Berlin, weaker than the incentive to walk.

There is an incoherence in this that Berlin has not bothered to resolve. Merz has contemplated asking France for nuclear cover for Germany as Washington’s commitment wavers. He then helped kill the one programme that would have given Germany a stake in the aircraft carrying that deterrent. France’s own capability was never in danger.

The F5 is funded and nuclear-certified, and Dassault will build it with or without Berlin. What died was the possibility of a nuclear-capable European platform that Germany part-owned and helped to build.

Merz wants free shelter under the force de frappe, and does not want to help build it. Plus, because he walked Germany out of the programme, France is driven back onto a purely sovereign path, one that serves Paris and does little for European deterrence.

That is not a French choice. It is a German one.

Then, when you look at the manner of the walking, this stops looking like a failure and starts looking like a plan.

The 48-hour consortium

FCAS was formally cancelled on June 8. On June 10, two days later, Schoellhorn stood at ILA Berlin and told the world: “We are ready to assume responsibility.” He added that Airbus had “the expertise, the technologies, the capacity and the clear determination” to build the sixth-generation fighter.

On June 11, eight German companies signed a strategic positioning paper formally launching a new consortium, Team Gen 6, with five Spanish firms closely integrated alongside them. The position paper had already been submitted to Merz’s office and to Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, calling for contracts to be awarded in full by the second half of 2026. Airbus had even released a concept video of the notional aircraft.

You do not produce a branded consortium, an eight-company partner list with five more firms integrated alongside it, a position paper submitted to two government ministries, and a concept video in 48 hours. Team Gen 6 was ready before FCAS was cancelled. Which raises an obvious question about how hard Airbus was really trying to save it.

The answer to how it was prepared had been visible for months. On February 9, 2026, while the Franco-German mediation was still nominally underway, a guest column appeared in Handelsblatt under the headline “Pardon Dassault, aber so geht es gar nicht,” excuse me, Dassault, but this simply won’t do.

The authors were Marie-Christine von Hahn, CEO of the BDLI, Germany’s aerospace industry association, and Jürgen Kerner, deputy chief of IG Metall. The piece accused Dassault of claiming “de facto exclusive control” of FCAS for close to a year, called this demand “an invitation to relinquish our industrial independence,” and proposed the two-aircraft solution as the obvious path forward. It called for politicians to “commit to two aircraft within FCAS.”

It read as a pressure campaign by German civil society on an obstructive French partner. In substance, it was. But the BDLI is not an independent civil society body. Its president is Michael Schoellhorn, the head of Airbus Defence and Space, the same man who spent months publicly feuding with Dassault over black boxes and IP rules, and the same man who announced Team Gen 6 at ILA Berlin four months later.

The chief of the German aerospace lobby and the chief of the German FCAS industrial partner are the same person. The Handelsblatt column is not external pressure on the programme. It is a coordinated communications move by one of the programme’s two industrial principals, using the country’s most influential business newspaper and the country’s largest trade union as amplifiers, to establish the narrative that Dassault alone was responsible for the impasse and to prepare the political ground for an exit that was already being planned.

Germany’s national aviation strategy, adopted by the cabinet on June 10, the same day Merz toured ILA and Schoellhorn declared himself ready, formally asserts that Airbus must co-lead any future German combat aircraft programme. Institutional lock-in and industrial positioning arrived together.

Spain was left as a bystander throughout: Madrid had hedged by funding an Airbus-Indra study on a national combat air system alongside the Indra-led Siagen programme, but had no say in the Franco-German decision to cancel. Belgium moved furthest of all, ordering 11 additional F-35As after Francken’s declaration in February.

Nowhere better to go

If FCAS is gone, what replaces it? Every option on the table, from a national point of view or the perspectives of European strategic autonomy and European federalism, is a huge step backwards.

But the GCAP option deserves more scrutiny than it usually receives. The Global Combat Air Programme, led by the UK, Italy, and Japan, is frequently described as further along and better organised than FCAS, with an operational target of 2035. It was also announced in 2022, five years after FCAS, and, from the outset, was a duplication of the Franco-German-Spanish effort rather than a complement to it. Leonardo CEO Lorenzo Mariani said exactly that at ILA Berlin on June 10: “Europe cannot have too many sixth-generation fighters under development, this is neither affordable nor helps Europe’s competitiveness.”

That was Mariani’s response to the suggestion that Germany might now join GCAP. Germany would be welcome in terms of capabilities and cost-sharing, he said, but “One also has to be mindful about the target date of 2035 for having the jet flying.”

Any new entrant will join a programme with an established workshare agreement that existing partners will not want to reduce. Germany’s industrial share in GCAP, if it joins at all, will be a fraction of what it held in FCAS. The real lesson Berlin appears to draw, that the problem was working with France and Dassault specifically, rather than joint development in principle, is visible in how quickly Germany moved to codify an alternative.

It is a self-serving lesson. Italy has already signalled that a new partner would push back the delivery date, and Japan is reportedly nervous about the 2035 deadline slipping even without one.

There is a hard point here that neither Berlin nor Paris has acknowledged. GCAP works for one reason: its three partners agreed in 2022 on an equal-partnership industrial model, the Edgewing joint venture, with each holding a 33.3% stake and no single partner claiming unilateral lead authority.

That is the arrangement Airbus spent four years demanding in FCAS. The difference is timing, and the difference is everything. GCAP’s partners settled it at the outset, before anyone held a lead to defend. Airbus was trying to impose it on a programme that had already made Dassault prime contractor, four years and three billion euros in.

When you look at it for what it is, this is clearly a renegotiation under duress dressed as a governance model, and Dassault was entitled to refuse it. Refusing is not obstruction. It is what the contract was for. The lesson is not that joint development cannot work, because GCAP and the Eurofighter programmes were clear proof that it can.

The lesson is that governance has to be settled before the money moves, because afterwards there is no honest way to change it, no arbitrator with the power to fix it, and no way to prevent bad actors from behaving like bad actors.

There is also the question of whether GCAP’s lead partner can deliver. UK Defence Secretary John Healey resigned on June 11, accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer of producing a Defence Investment Plan that “falls well short of what is required.” Starmer himself announced his resignation eleven days later, on 22 June, leaving the programme’s lead nation without a settled government as it asks partners to commit for the next decade.

The UK had already signed only a three-month stopgap GCAP contract in May, and Italy’s defence minister, Guido Crosetto, publicly sympathised with Healey, noting that he was fighting his own spending battle. Britain is committed to AUKUS submarine construction and GCAP fighter development simultaneously, in an economy that has not grown its defence budget at the pace either programme requires.

The three-partner programme that is supposed to absorb Germany’s ambitions is under financial strain, and that was before any German accession added another layer of workshare negotiation to an already pressurised timeline.

The other options are no better. Germany deepening its reliance on F-35s means a deeper reliance on American weapons, American supply chains, and American political permission to conduct nuclear deterrence missions, at the precise moment when that permission is most visibly in doubt.

France developing a national Rafale successor alone produces a fragmented European air combat landscape with no shared platform, no shared deterrence logic, and no pooled industrial capacity. An extended Eurofighter life for Germany is a deferral, not a strategy.

A pattern, not an accident

FCAS did not fail in isolation. It failed in company.

The Main Ground Combat System (MGCS), the Franco-German initiative to replace the Leclerc and Leopard 2 tanks, launched in the same year on the same bilateral logic, is in comparable difficulty, mired in disputes between Nexter and Rheinmetall over the same governance and workshare questions.

The fear, expressed explicitly by KNDS (the Nexter-KMW joint venture), is contagion: that the FCAS collapse will accelerate the MGCS collapse, producing a domino effect across the entire architecture of Franco-German defence cooperation.

It is worse than contagion. On 1 July, weeks after FCAS died, Trappier told the French Senate that Airbus had tried to force Dassault out of the Eurodrone, the four-nation surveillance drone programme in which Airbus is the German-led prime and Dassault the junior partner.

His account, confirmed by Reuters, was blunt: “Airbus told us to get out. We don’t agree, and so we are in discussions on why we are excluded. I can’t tell you any more about where the programme is because relations are broken at a programme level.”

The roles are the mirror image of FCAS. On the fighter, Dassault was the prime and supposedly pushed the Germans towards the exit. On the drone, Airbus is the prime, and Dassault says it is being shown the door. The same two companies, the same fight over workshare and leadership, playing out on a second programme within a month of the first one collapsing.

The cause is less lurid than the language. France cut its own Eurodrone orders in the 2024-2030 Military Programming Law, and under European contracting rules workshare follows orders, so Dassault’s share shrank automatically. Dassault is now seeking compensation from Airbus for the loss. Nobody had to act in bad faith for the partnership to break. And note what follows from that. The Eurodrone rift did not spread from FCAS. It arose on its own, in a different programme, from an entirely separate cause, weeks apart. Two flagship partnerships breaking from different causes, weeks apart, is not contagion. It is the same flaw surfacing twice, and the second time it did not even need a villain.

This is what tells you the problem is not personal or even national. It is the model itself, which hands rival champions a shared programme and no way to settle who leads.

Which raises the obvious objection to everything set out above. If the model breaks partnerships on its own, why dwell on Team Gen 6 and the Handelsblatt column? Because the model does not merely break partnerships. It rewards the partner who breaks them first.

In a structure with no binding arbitration and no penalty for walking away, the rational move for any player who expects failure is to prepare an exit while professing commitment and to ensure the other side bears the blame. Schoellhorn did exactly that, and it worked.

The premeditation is not a rival explanation to the structural one. It is what the structure produces. Berlin’s conduct was contemptible, and it was also, given the incentives Europe has built, entirely predictable.

Airbus spent the same week announcing a study with Kawasaki on a maritime Eurodrone variant for Japan. The consortium fractures at home; the prime contractor prospects abroad. Nobody involved appears to think these are related.

The pattern is not only industrial. It is also a matter of how the story gets told, and who tells it.

FCAS and MGCS were conceived as symmetrical initiatives. Germany would lead the tank programme, and France would lead the fighter. Each country led one flagship. What followed was, in the Carnegie assessment, “a steady unravelling of these carefully constructed equilibria.” The symmetry that was supposed to defuse competition created two simultaneous battlegrounds instead.

As Johanna Möhring of Université Grenoble Alpes observed, “even after six decades of one of the world’s most institutionalized bilateral relationships, under relentless geopolitical pressure and with compelling economic incentives to unite, France and Germany still pursue divergent security strategies.” Six decades of the Élysée Treaty, and the two countries still cannot build a plane together.

This has happened before. In the 1980s, France walked out of the European fighter consortium over precisely this question of leadership and went on to build the Rafale alone. At the same time, Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain produced the Eurofighter without it.

Two programmes where there should have been one, higher costs for everyone, and reduced interoperability across the continent. FCAS was meant to be the correction, the moment Europe finally pooled its combat-air industry instead of splitting it.

Instead, it has reproduced the same fracture and produced a worse result. The Eurofighter and Rafale at least flew. FCAS leaves France building its own jet, Germany assembling a consortium, and Europe with four sixth-generation fighter programmes, perhaps soon five, none of them at the scale needed to compete with the United States or China.

Marion Messmer of Chatham House put the danger plainly: Europe risks repeating the mistakes of the late 1980s. The difference is that in the 1980s nobody pretended the fragmentation was strategic autonomy.

Merz and Macron, Schoellhorn and Trappier are not uniquely obstructive figures. They operated in a framework designed without the tools to resolve the conflicts it inevitably generated.

There was no European structure standing above the two companies, no binding arbitration, nothing to enforce cooperation once the incentives pointed elsewhere.

Future Warfare Magazine put it plainly: FCAS risks becoming “a case study in how not to design a fighter, because no one really decided what war it was meant to fight.” Equipment planning sits at the bottom of a strategic pyramid. Starting there, without resolving political requirements above it, is not defence planning. It is an industrial policy in uniform.

There is a question Berlin has been allowed to dodge, and it deserves asking plainly: Why is Germany working so hard to dismantle its industrial partnerships with France, one programme at a time, rather than to fix them?

On the fighter, Germany walked, and the replacement was already drafted. On the tank, Berlin used its political weight to force Rheinmetall into a programme KNDS was meant to lead, and the three-way fight over pillars and production shares that followed has left MGCS, nine years on, with twenty-five million euros disbursed between every company building it. Twenty-five million. For the tank meant to defend the continent.

France is now edging away from it, and Berlin’s industry has been quick to make that the story. Five days after FCAS collapsed, Rheinmetall’s chief executive told Welt am Sonntag that a French exit could not be ruled out and that Paris was weighing a budget cut of more than half. He runs the firm Berlin pushed into the programme, and he was speaking in the week his country was caught with a rival consortium already assembled. Read that briefing the way you have learned to read the Handelsblatt column.

If Paris does walk, it will be hard to blame. What is the argument for funding a joint tank with a partner who has just demonstrated, on the aircraft, precisely what its commitments are worth? German conduct on FCAS has made French caution rational, and that is the most corrosive thing about it. Distrust of this kind does not stay inside one programme.

In each case the German move is presented as pragmatism, a hard-headed defence of national industry and German jobs. It is worth taking that defence seriously before deciding what it really is.

What dies with it

The Le Monde analysis published in March was right on one point: without the NGF, FCAS is not entirely dead. The drones and the combat cloud will continue, with Airbus, Thales, and Indra as the industrial anchor. Merz told ILA Berlin the cloud architecture should become a central Franco-German project, with a work plan due at the July 17 intergovernmental council.

The EUMET engine venture between Safran, MTU Aero Engines, and ITP Aero continued to grow throughout the entire airframe paralysis; MTU now argues that a single-engine consortium should supply both countries’ eventual national jets. That is the residue of nine years of work: a software architecture and an engine, without the plane they were built to serve.

The flagship is gone. And with it goes something harder to replace than hardware.

What was lost was not only a European capability. As late as February 2026, with the programme already visibly failing, India told the France-India defence dialogue in Bengaluru that it wanted to join, weighing FCAS against GCAP as the European programme it might back.

A sixth-generation effort capable of drawing in one of the world’s largest arms importers as a co-development partner was not a failure of ambition or appeal. It was a failure of the people running it. The market was there. The partners were there. The money, Germany has since made clear, was there too: Berlin’s defence budget is set to pass 100 billion euros this year and reach around 153 billion by 2029. What was missing was the willingness to be governed by anyone else, on either side.

FCAS was supposed to be the proof of concept for European strategic autonomy in its most demanding form. Not buying American or off-the-shelf but building true European capability at the technological frontier from within. If Europe cannot coordinate the industrial politics of a fighter jet between its two largest defence powers, what exactly is the “European pillar of NATO” that leaders keep invoking?

Pia Fuhrhop of the SWP argued in the Carnegie assessment that the end of FCAS does not kill European defence cooperation. The European Sky Shield Initiative and the Common Armoured Vehicle Program show that European states can cooperate at scale when the governance is simpler.

That is, admittedly, somewhat true. The problem is that those programmes are capability enhancements built on the assumption of procuring existing systems.

They cannot substitute for the joint development of sovereign frontier technology, and they do not even attempt to do so. Blaming the FCAS governance model for this failure is Brussels’ equivalent of blaming the weather. The institutional design was always wrong. Somebody needed to fix it before the cheque was signed, not nine years later.

The logic of European strategic autonomy has always depended on Europe’s combined industrial weight being properly organised to sustain the full spectrum of military capability without dependence on the United States. American commitment to European security has never been more visibly conditional.

European leaders are actively discussing sheltering under France’s nuclear umbrella precisely because Washington’s extended deterrence is in question. In that context, the failure to sustain the programme designed to prove Europe could do this is not a setback. It is an indictment.

The most that can be said for Berlin

Put the German case at its strongest. For three decades Germany spent too little on defence, sheltered under an American umbrella it assumed was permanent, and took the junior industrial seat in most of the programmes it joined, building parts of other countries’ aircraft rather than its own.

Then the umbrella began to look conditional, first under one American president and now unmistakably under another. Germany found itself rearming at a scale unseen since reunification, with a defence budget climbing towards 153 billion euros a year and no sovereign fighter industry to spend it into.

Seen from Berlin, that is the vulnerability that matters. A country that has decided it can no longer assume anyone will defend it needs an industrial base it controls, one that builds capability at home instead of renting it from Paris.

Permanent junior partnership to Dassault meant funding French sovereignty in exchange for subassemblies and a veto Germany did not hold over the core technology. The black-box fight was precisely about this. Germany wanted the ability to build a fighter, and Dassault was never going to hand it over.

So, Berlin decided to build the muscle itself. Team Gen 6, Airbus as prime, a national aviation strategy that mandates German co-leadership: read generously, this is Germany finally doing what everyone spent years demanding it do, which is take responsibility for its own defence.

That is the steelman, and it is not weak. The trouble is what it assumes, and what it costs.

There is a shorter answer to the grievance, and Berlin has never had to give it. Germany signed the thing. In 2017, and again in December 2022 when it put its name to Phase 1B and three point two billion euros, Berlin accepted a structure that made Dassault prime contractor on the aircraft. Discovering four years and several billion euros later that you dislike the terms you agreed to is not a case for sovereignty. It is a case for reading contracts.

The case also assumes that Europe, like America, cannot be relied upon. That France, in Berlin’s private reckoning, is a supplier to be worked around or an obstacle to be removed. That is the quiet premise underneath every German move of the past year, and it is the tell.

A Germany that believed in European strategic autonomy would build its industrial muscle inside the collective and absorb the friction of partnership, because pooled capability that actually exists is worth more than sovereign capability a decade away.

A Germany that has privately concluded the collective will fail builds its own and treats that failure as a forecast rather than a choice it is helping to make.

The desperation is real, and it is the engine of all of this. Merz’s government faces a threat it is not equipped to deal with and a protector it can no longer trust, and fear is a reasonable response to both. But fear-driven industrial nationalism is still industrial nationalism, and it produces the outcome that malice would: a Europe that cannot combine, because its largest and richest member has decided that combining is a danger to be avoided.

Germany is not wrong that it needs sovereign capability; it is just wrong that the way to build it is to pull apart every partnership that might have given Europe capability collectively and to take the selfish road.

And it does not even work on its own terms.

The national base Germany is now constructing will cost more and arrive later than the European one it walked away from, and it will export against the Rafale rather than alongside it. Berlin will end the decade with a fighter industry it did not have and a European defence order weaker than the one it inherited, at the precise moment it needs European strength most.

This is insurance bought by burning down the house it was meant to protect, and the selfishness behind it is real enough. It is not the confident selfishness of a country pressing an advantage. This is the selfishness of the frightened, a leadership that has stopped believing its allies will be there and has decided to save itself first.

The structural lesson

What follows now is fragmentation dressed as progress. France builds its own plane. Germany organises Team Gen 6 around Airbus, courts Sweden or the UK, and adopts a national aviation strategy that institutionalises the very requirement, Airbus co-leadership, which made FCAS impossible. Spain scrambles to avoid being left behind. The combat cloud gets a work plan. Everyone calls it a reset.

The July 17 ministerial council will produce a narrowed work programme. It may prove more durable than FCAS precisely because it is less ambitious. But smaller ambitions are not the same as better ones.

Berlin is expected to settle its own path by the autumn, and the three options Pistorius has set out, joining an existing programme such as GCAP, backing the Airbus-led Team Gen 6, or simply buying more F-35s, share one feature. None of the three rebuilds a single European combat-air programme. Each, in its way, ratifies the split.

Here is the part that should worry anyone who believes in the European project:

FCAS failed not because the ambition was wrong, but because the structure was broken. Two sovereign governments and two rival champions were given the chance to run a continental-scale programme and told to cooperate, with no federal mechanism above them to make cooperation binding when national interests pulled in the opposite direction.

And do not reach for the obvious objection that Europe already has the machinery. It does, and it is instructive machinery. The Eurodrone is administered by OCCAR, the closest thing the continent has to a joint procurement agency. Note what OCCAR is. European states built it outside the Union, under their own convention, with a British member and a board on which every participant holds a veto. It is what governments construct when they want the appearance of a European structure and none of its obligations.

And it changed nothing.

When Paris cut its own order under the Military Programming Law, OCCAR could not stop the workshare from collapsing behind it because it administers programmes. It does not set requirements, and it cannot compel a member state to buy anything. A shared programme office is not pooled sovereignty.

Europe has spent thirty years building the office and refusing the sovereignty. The Eurodrone is what that produces.

This is the same flaw that hobbles European defence procurement, European capital markets, and European foreign policy: the insistence that twenty-seven sovereignties, or in this case three, can coordinate frontier-scale projects through goodwill and intergovernmental bargaining alone.

And unfortunately for everyone, based on what the FCAS programme has shown us, they have proven that they cannot, with the most expensive failure in the continent’s history.

The choice Europe keeps refusing to make is between genuine pooled sovereignty and permanent strategic dependence. FCAS was a chance to choose the former. Berlin chose the latter and dressed it up as industrial pragmatism.

The lesson of FCAS is not that Europe should stop trying. It is that intergovernmental cooperation at this scale, without a federal structure to enforce it, will fail every time national interest and corporate interest align against it, which is always. France will build its plane. Germany will build its consortium. Both will be smaller, slower, and more dependent than the thing they could have built together. And the next time three leaders unveil a plane model at an air show, the only honest question to ask is which of them is already planning the press release for when it dies.

Europe does not lack the engineers, the money, or the enemies to justify the effort. It lacks the institutions to hold its own ambitions together. Until that changes, every flagship will end the way this one did, and each time a European capital will call the wreckage sovereignty. FCAS was the test.

Europe failed it and hasn’t even understood that it was a test in the first place.

Thank you for reading the French Dispatch! If you liked what you read, you should like this post and subscribe to the newsletter by clicking/tapping the button below:

Subscribe now

And if you’d like to contribute a coffee or two to help fuel my coverage of the wild world of politics, feel free to click on the picture below:

Follow us

BlueSky | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Twitch | Youtube

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading articles written by high-level experts, then make sure to support the publication by liking, subscribing, and sharing it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

This week

• 🚓Marine Le Pen + Rassemblement National convicted

• 😢Bardella relegated to Prime Ministerial candidate

• 🤝Glucksmann considers friendship with PS

🚓Marine Le Pen + Rassemblement National convicted

So, ladies and gentlemen, the big news of the week: Marine Le Pen and her party of criminal ne’er-do-wells have been convicted of financial embezzlement and several other offences, and through the luck of being wealthy politicians, have somehow avoided doing hard prison time.

For reference, Marine Le Pen is now ineligible to practice as a lawyer, and Jean Valjean spent 19 years in prison for stealing some bread.

If you want to read more about the details of this, you can read it here on The French Dispatch:

And of course, I’m always curious about your opinions on the conviction of convicted criminal Marine Le Pen, so drop them below in the comments.

😢Bardella relegated to Prime Ministerial candidate

For most of the past year, Bardella behaved like a man expecting to be the nominee. He built out his own foreign profile with trips abroad, including to Poland, was actively attempting to build a contrast between himself and the other candidates, especially Gabriel Attal, and he ran a distinct line on the retirement age that put him at odds with Le Pen’s own 2022 platform.

During his time running the show, Bardella’s polling numbers climbed to between 33 and 38% as a standalone candidate, with his favourability nearly doubling to reach 40% by late June.

Le Parisien reported that he described the position as “Hyperinconfortable,” caught between preparing to replace Le Pen and not wanting to look like he was pushing her out, attempting to manage all of the internal dynamics as a non-Le Pen replacing the heiress to the throne.

Some commentators have argued that Bardella’s entire pitch, a leader who wasn’t a Le Pen by blood, was central to the RN’s case that it had shed its dynastic reputation and had moved beyond its often sombre past.

The unity since the verdict has been carefully staged, and some of it predates the ruling itself. At an RN fête champêtre in Liévin on 4 July, which was almost staged like a slow-motion handover, Le Pen told Bardella, according to Le Parisien: “In any case, we will run this campaign together, my dear Jordan.”

The two then rode to the TF1 studios in the same car on verdict night and made their first joint campaign stop the next morning in La Flèche, a Sarthe town the RN won in this year’s municipal elections. Bardella told reporters there that it was neither relief nor disappointment, and that he was glad his mentor got to carry the party’s colours, and that he was obviously incredibly happy about the result.

People close to Le Pen describe something closer to a comedown than contentment: “It’s normal that there’s a backlash,” one adviser said, noting that polling above 30% as a likely presidential contender is not nothing to walk back from and indicating that they expected some kind of tensions internally.

What the staging doesn’t resolve is the problems and resentments that will run beneath the surface. The Rassemblement National’s leadership met again on Friday for a second closed-door seminar on the campaign platform, and the sharpest disagreement so far is over the retirement age: Bardella has pushed all year for the 62-year threshold to rise, while Le Pen keeps insisting a lower one remains her position.

Now the reason for this is fairly simple: Macron and the liberals all pushed for a rise in the retirement age for economic reasons, and the populist backlash meant that the only popular position was to run against this.

However, since the discussion exploded last year, Bardella has been clear behind the scenes that he didn’t necessarily support lowering the retirement age again and tended to dodge the question.

Officially, the party will run on one programme regardless of who leads it, but Le Pen’s decision to force her candidacy despite the ongoing legal issues, and whatever the judicial logic behind it, is also a decision about whose name the platform ultimately answers to and whose political career is subservient to whom.

The fact that she is doing this despite the fact that Bardella already outpolls her by four points in a potential second-round against Édouard Philippe, an event that he will not even get to run in, will continue to be a painful event in Bardella’s career.

And it will be even worse if Le Pen’s legal issues end up costing them the Presidency.

🤝Glucksmann considers friendship with PS

To wrap up the week: Raphaël Glucksmann is currently weighing his options and his allies ahead of the 2027 presidential elections (Source: everyone but Raphaël Glucksmann.)

Glucksmann’s political position has been the focus of increasingly strenuous analysis over the past few months, especially after his 4,000-person-strong 2027 campaign launch event in Paris last month.

And this has become more pressing: following months of dithering, the Parti Socialiste’s militants finally made a decision and voted this Thursday for a “closed” primary in October, open only to party members and allied “pôle socialiste” groups like Glucksmann’s own Place Publique. However, it was only supported by 55.5% of the militants.

You can imagine that the 44.5% who voted against this wanted a primary that included the entire left, including far-left boogeyman Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

While First Secretary Olivier Faure achieved one of his goals, this result is technically a defeat for the left-wing leader who wanted the vote thrown open to sympathisers who had paid a two-euro participation fee instead, and it buries any hope of the wider unity primary with the Greens, Communists, and ex-Insoumis that he’d been pitching and campaigning for these past few months.

Importantly, however, the actual rules of the contest, meanwhile, are still being written by an “inter-party committee” that hasn’t met yet, so there may even be a way of these actors being involved.

Candidates are already piling into what is, on paper, a fairly small pond. PS deputy Philippe Brun got there first, on 30 June. His colleague Jérôme Guedj has been eyeing the Élysée since February, and Friday brought the real surprise: Ségolène Royal, the party’s 2007 nominee, announced on X that she was running “with humility, no ego,” under the banner of a tranquil France and a just order.

Nothing says humility like a third act from a failed politician who burnt her reputation with conspiratorial nonsense during COVID.

Place Publique welcomed the vote as an “outstretched hand” from PS militants and said talks with their socialist friends would begin very quickly to figure out what was possible for both parties.

Interestingly, one PS official said the quiet part out loud, and stated that the primary was practically designed to measure for Glucksmann, and on the other hand, Glucksmann’s team spent that same day telling France Inter there’s no guarantee he actually takes part, and floated running without a primary at all if the terms don’t suit him and the polling allows him a significant margin of success.

However, Faure isn’t leaving him much room to dodge a primary: anyone who wants PS backing, he argued, has to submit to a vote of the membership, and made it clear to any potential candidates that “you don’t win a presidential election by hiding.”

Faure also hasn’t ruled out running in the primary himself, despite the heavyweight candidates beginning to pile up around him. Faure is releasing a book on his vision for France, due out in September, and, as a staple of French presidential declarations, his candidacy is almost guaranteed. Meanwhile, his chief internal rival, Boris Vallaud, has directly announced his participation in the primary: “I want a fight.”

Add rumours of Bernard Cazeneuve and a Hollande-shaped safety net waiting in reserve should the PS still be stuck by winter, and the primary built to crown Glucksmann might end up settling something else entirely.

Problematically for the PS, any candidate who makes it through is not guaranteed to be the most popular with the wider French population, and, even worse, the ever-more aggressive shadow of Jean-Luc Mélenchon will continue to weigh over the proceedings like a blanket, suffocating the political potential of any centre-left candidate.

Thank you for reading the French Dispatch! If you liked what you read, you should like this post and subscribe to the newsletter by clicking/tapping the button below:

Subscribe now

And if you’d like to contribute a coffee or two to help fuel my coverage of the wild world of politics, feel free to click on the picture below:

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading articles written by high-level experts, then make sure to support the publication by liking, subscribing, and sharing it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

Huge news today coming from the Rassemblement National’s assistants affair:

The court has confirmed Marine Le Pen’s sentence, condemning her to three years in prison, with two years suspended and the remaining year served under home detention subject to electronic monitoring.

It also sentenced her to a €100,000 fine and forty-five months of ineligibility from public life, thirty of them suspended. The court ruled that the fifteen firm months have already been served, with the clock having begun on 31 March 2025, the day the first-instance tribunal attached provisional execution (exécution provisoire) to her original conviction, and it never stopped.

That single technical point is the story. At first instance, prosecutors secured five years of ineligibility and made it immediately enforceable, a decision that effectively barred Le Pen from the 2027 race regardless of any appeal. The appeal court cut the underlying sentence roughly in half and let the clock that had already been running count against the reduced term. Fifteen firm months, backdated to March 2025, leaves nothing outstanding in July 2026. Barring a further reversal at the Court of Cassation (pourvoi en cassation), Le Pen is free to stand in April 2027.

The party did not escape either, fined €2 million as a legal entity and ordered to forfeit a further €1 million, on top of the individual sentences handed to eleven co-defendants retried alongside Le Pen.

This is not RN’s only file open in court. A separate case over inflated 2012 campaign-kit invoicing, the kits de campagne affair, tied to the Jeanne micro-party and a communications firm run by party adviser Frédéric Chatillon, ended in a conviction the Court of Cassation upheld for good in June 2024; Saint-Just, sentenced again on Tuesday, was among the defendants there too.

A newer inquiry is still live: prosecutors opened a preliminary investigation in mid-2024 into roughly €316,000 of disputed spending on Le Pen’s 2022 presidential campaign accounts, after a referral from the campaign-finance watchdog (CNCCFP) over irregular bus-livery costs. That file has since passed to an examining magistrate and remains open, untouched by Tuesday’s ruling.

Court president Michèle Agi was blunt about why the underlying conduct mattered: The scheme ran for more than eleven years across three parliamentary terms, moving large sums while creating an unfair advantage over rival parties and discrediting the European Parliament in the process.

The offence was worse, in her reading, because it had been committed by elected officials entrusted with upholding the public interest. The judge noted, all the same, that Le Pen personally pocketed nothing from it.

On the sentence itself, Agi was equally direct: ineligibility is not automatic, she said, and the court must weigh it against “the freedom to stand as a candidate” and the voters’ own right to choose. That is as close as a judge gets to explaining, on the record, why Le Pen is walking out with a lighter ban than the prosecution wanted.

Le Pen herself had already supplied the counterargument. Asked on LCI six days before the ruling whether she could campaign while tagged, she said it would simply “not be possible.” Her reasoning: a presidential candidate needs to move freely, not depend on a magistrate’s permission to hold a rally. Bruno Retailleau, the LR presidential candidate, had the obvious rebuttal ready on BFM-TV: politicians are “neither below nor above the law.”

The court just answered the legal question. The political one, whether Le Pen actually leads the RN ticket in 2027 or hands it to Jordan Bardella, was never really about ineligibility. It was about whether she is willing to run a campaign from under an ankle tag, and about whether the unity she and Bardella performed at a rally in Liévin last weekend survives a year in which one of them is free to campaign without restriction and the other, on paper, is not.

Rivals across the spectrum, Le Monde reported, are already gaming out a Bardella candidacy, and polls have also largely focused on this point. Today's ruling did not close that question, but did give the RN roughly ten months to answer it, whilst also opening a potential internal division within the party.

While Le Pen did say she would not campaign with an ankle bracelet, the big question we all have now is whether this will open any faultlines within the RN, and whether she will assume the mantle of presidential candidate.

Or will she be happy to step aside, put to bed her presidential ambitions in an election many suspect the RN could win, and be happy playing second fiddle to Jordan Bardella, who would likely make her Prime Minister in a parliament many expect to remain unstable, unwieldy, and ungovernable?

Thank you for reading the French Dispatch! If you liked what you read, you should like this post and subscribe to the newsletter by clicking/tapping the button below:

Subscribe now

And if you’d like to contribute a coffee or two to help fuel my coverage of the wild world of politics, feel free to click on the picture below:

Follow us

BlueSky | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Twitch | Youtube

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading articles written by high-level experts, then make sure to support the publication by liking, subscribing, and sharing it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

This week

• 🗳️Presidential Election date announced

• ⚖️Le Pen’s verdict lands this Tuesday

• 🌹Hollande leads in a divided left

🗳️Presidential Election date announced

Let’s start the week off with the most important news: the French government has now confirmed that the 2027 presidential election will take place on 18 April and 2 May.

The dates were formally endorsed by the Council of Ministers on 1 July. Article 7 of the Constitution requires the vote to fall between twenty and thirty-five days before the end of the president’s term, and that’s what actually did the choosing here: Macron’s second mandate began on 14 May 2022, leaving the government exactly two workable pairs of dates: 11 and 25 April, or 18 April and 2 May. It took the second.

Naturally, this is modern France, so both ends of the political spectrum found something to dislike. That’s usually a sign a decision was reasonably balanced.

The far-right Rassemblement National’s Sébastien Chenu called it “a manoeuvre of the president,” arguing that voting the day after the 1 May marches, which carry their own political charge, sits badly with the campaign’s silence period.

LFI’s complaint runs the other way: its own officials are frustrated at losing their highest-turnout mobilisation day to electoral purdah the day before the vote. Roughly 34 political figures have already signalled interest in running, and as of this week, neither the bloc central nor the traditional right has settled on one name between them.

Worth remembering why the field is this open in the first place: Macron is constitutionally barred from a third consecutive term, with Article 6 capping a president at two consecutive mandates. So, for the first time since 2017, there’s no incumbent on the ballot at all.

Plus, getting onto that ballot is its own hurdle, and a bigger one than any poll number.

The left has its own date to add to the calendar: a primary scheduled for 11 October 2026 meant to produce one joint candidate. The problem: bigger names like Raphaël Glucksmann have already confirmed they won’t take part, while the Socialists’ Olivier Faure keeps defending the idea regardless.

The presidential election date now sits alongside three major questions: the RN’s succession issues, resolved one way or another this coming Tuesday; a right and centre that still can’t agree who’s meant to be occupying that space in ten months and what they plan to do; and a left primary process that hasn’t secured the participation of everyone it’s meant to unite.

⚖️Le Pen’s verdict lands this Tuesday

Moving over to the far-right, Marine Le Pen will only need to be left in limbo for three more days.

The Cour d’appel de Paris will rule on Tuesday 7 July 2026 on whether Marine Le Pen’s conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds holds, and with it, whether she will legally be eligible to run in 2027.

The prosecution has already hedged its own bet. The first-instance sentence, handed down in March 2025, took effect the moment it was read out in front of the country: five years’ ineligibility, four years in prison with two served under an electronic tag, and a €100,000 fine. February’s appeal demand kept the ineligibility and the fine, halved the custodial term served under a tracker, and dropped the request for immediate execution altogether.

Le Pen has already served 15 months of that ineligibility period; a sentence of 2 years or less would make her eligible again on 31 March 2027, weeks before the first round. Legal scholar Camille Aynès rates an outright acquittal “extremely unlikely,” given how thoroughly both trials established the funding system.

Le Pen isn’t banking on the arithmetic either way: she’s said she’ll draw her own conclusions the moment Tuesday’s ruling lands, without waiting on the Cour de cassation. “I’m not afraid,” she told LCI earlier this week, displaying bravado as she faced the end of her career.

Le Pen and Jordan Bardella closed ranks at a joint appearance in Liévin over the weekend. A fresh Odoxa poll finds that 74% of French voters say disqualification wouldn’t durably weaken the RN. Bardella now edges Le Pen in favourability for the first time, 40 to 39, which, to my mind, matters more than the disqualification question itself.

If she’s barred, the handover won’t happen at once. Party officials are pointing to an autumn launch for Bardella, intended to buy the RN a season to manage a divergence that’s already causing them problems: Le Pen still wants the retirement age back at 62, while Bardella has spent months softening the message for employers wary of the bill.

Whichever name ends up on the ballot in 2027, the funds at the centre of Tuesday’s ruling were European money, and the RN continues to be hammered with investigations.

🌹Hollande leads in a divided left

Moving over to the left, this week’s most interesting poll turns on a name that hasn’t declared anything.

An Elabe poll for Les Échos published Friday puts François Hollande ahead of the rest of the French left for the first time since his 2017 exit, at 46% favourability among left-wing voters. François Ruffin follows at 45%, Raphaël Glucksmann at 42%, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Fabien Roussel tied at 41%.

Now, Holland isn’t currently a declared candidate, but he hasn’t ruled it out either. Les Échos itself frames this as “something happening around François Hollande” on the left. I’d put it differently: when the man forced out of politics by record unpopularity in 2017 tops the field a decade on, that’s a diagnosis of how unsettled the rest of the left still is, not a comeback story.

Hollande himself isn’t discouraging the chatter. He’s kept up a steady run of interviews, op-eds and public appearances since leaving office, and Les Échos notes he’s sounding more openly ambitious even while stopping short of declaring. At 71, that reads as calculated: it keeps him relevant to every headline about a fractured left without exposing him to the arithmetic of an actual campaign. Whether that’s strategy or vanity depends on how the rest of this poll ages.

Widen the sample to all French voters, and Hollande drops to ninth place, at 25% favourability, behind Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen (tied at 38%, whichever of them is still standing after Tuesday’s ruling), Édouard Philippe (34%) and Marion Maréchal (33%), with Gabriel Attal, Bruno Retailleau and Gérald Darmanin filling out the top ten.

The right and centre are no more settled than the left they’d mock for this poll. Laurent Wauquiez has spent the past fortnight publicly needling Bruno Retailleau over polling below 10%, floating Édouard Philippe as the steadier option without quite endorsing him.

With the vote now fixed for 18 April and 2 May, every bloc, left, right and centre, is still running trial balloons instead of campaigns. That’s worth keeping in mind the next time one of these polls gets reported as candidate news.

Now, one important thing to raise about the former president, and what could cause an issue for Faure, is that Hollande opposes the primary itself, the same one the rest of the fractured left has scheduled for 11 October. Hollande has said that he’d rather see a “social-democratic” candidate emerge some other way.

So, topping a popularity poll while sidestepping the one mechanism built to produce an actual nominee looks like a bet that the mechanism collapses before he ever has to commit to it, and it seems like the wily former president is genuinely angling to be a saviour candidate following a bureaucratic failure.

Hollande may even be positioning himself as the responsible choice alongside far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Thank you for reading the French Dispatch! If you liked what you read, you should like this post and subscribe to the newsletter by clicking/tapping the button below:

Subscribe now

And if you’d like to contribute a coffee or two to help fuel my coverage of the wild world of politics, feel free to click on the picture below:

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entire…

Read more

Follow us

BlueSky | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Twitch | Youtube

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading artic…

Read more

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our …

Read more

Follow us

BlueSky | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Twitch | Youtube

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading artic…

Read more

Follow us

BlueSky | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Twitch | Youtube

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading artic…

Read more

Follow us

Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Twitch | Youtube

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading articles written by high-level experts, then make sure to support the publication by liking, subscribing, and sharing it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

I had the great pleasure to head to Prague this week to take part in the 2026 GLOBSEC Forum, and had the chance to catch up with a friend of the Dispatch, from , for a live video recorded on the sidelines.

As you’ll hear in this video, Thursday set the tone for the whole event.

A session featuring former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and former US Defence Secretary Mark Esper addressed Europe’s new security reality, which is the polite way of saying: what happens when you can no longer assume Washington has your back.

Both men agreed the dependency had gone on too long. Rasmussen pushed for a formalised Coalition of the Willing within NATO; Esper preferred expanding the existing Joint Expeditionary Force rather than risk further fracturing the alliance.

They found common ground on Ukraine’s NATO membership, arguing for the German 1955 model, with Article 5 applying only to government-controlled territory. Rasmussen went further, making the case that Europe had thrown away its best leverage during the Iran conflict by immediately declaring it wasn’t its war.

What was harder to watch was the broader conference atmosphere around US-EU relations. The official discourse from established politicians was notably managed: resilient partnership, shared values, transatlantic cooperation intact. However, the audience did not seem persuaded, and it appeared that there was a gap between what the podium says and what the people in the seats actually believe, and Prague made that visible.

Later that afternoon, I was on stage with French Minister Delegate for European Affairs Benjamin Haddad, ECFR director Mark Leonard, and others for a panel on whether Europe’s institutions are actually built for the moment they keep claiming to be rising to. That conversation was rather less diplomatic. Haddad made the case for optimism, but tied it to delivery on the single market and the upcoming Multi-annual Financial Framework.

Others on the panel were less patient: the argument that Europe has spent years being passive where it needed to act and hyperactive where it needed to restrain itself landed with some force.

The question of whether Brussels can reform fast enough to matter before the moment passes did not receive a comfortable answer.

Thank you for reading the French Dispatch! If you liked what you read, you should like this post and subscribe to the newsletter by clicking/tapping the button below:

Subscribe now

And if you’d like to contribute a coffee or two to help fuel my coverage of the wild world of politics, feel free to click on the picture below:

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading articles written by high-level experts, then make sure to support the publication by liking, subscribing, and sharing it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

The Parquet national financier confirmed that a formal judicial investigation will be opened against Édouard Philippe, his deputy, Stéphanie de Bazelaire, and the metropole’s director general, Claire-Sophie Tasias. The opening order was signed on 7 May, according to Le Monde’s reporting from yesterday.

An investigating magistrate, a juge d’instruction, now takes over a preliminary inquiry that has been running since 2023, with searches already carried out at the hôtel de ville and the metropolitan offices in April 2024.

The charges are familiar to anyone who has followed the file: misappropriation of public funds, favouritism, illegal taking of interest, concussion (the unlawful collection of sums by a public official), and moral harassment. Philippe’s office told AFP the candidate “takes note” of the procedure and will answer the magistrate’s questions “as he always has, with serenity.” His lawyer, Emmanuel Marsigny, declined to comment.

The Cité numérique file

The case turns on a multi-year service agreement signed on 30 July 2020. The communauté urbaine, then chaired by Philippe, contracted with the association LH French Tech for €2.154 million. The association was chaired pro bono by de Bazelaire, who also held an elected position as deputy mayor for digital affairs.

The arrangement: a public official negotiating a €2.154 million public subsidy with an association run by another elected member of her own majority. LH French Tech, created in July 2020, was the only candidate to respond to the call for expressions of interest that the metropole itself had launched four months earlier.

The whistleblower, who has used the pseudonym Judith throughout the file, was hired as deputy director general in September 2020, and by the time she started raising internal notes about LH French Tech in late 2021, €1.15 million had already been transferred.

The agreement was cut short in March 2022, the lease at the Cité numérique was terminated three months later, and the association was placed in liquidation in 2023. Her fixed-term contract was not renewed, and she filed a civil-party complaint in June 2025, which eventually led to the case being referred to an investigating magistrate.

She has since obtained whistleblower status from the Défenseur des droits, granted on 21 January 2025 after a two-year adversarial enquiry. The metropole is contesting that decision before the tribunal administratif de Paris, which her counsel describes as a textbook strategic lawsuit designed to silence her (procédure-bâillon, or SLAPP).

Read more

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading articles by high-level experts, make sure to support the publication by liking, subscribing, and sharing it with your friends and colleagues, and consider a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

We may finally be seeing the next step in the federalisation of the European Union.

Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Poland have spent the last few weeks locked in negotiations behind closed doors. The conclusions are about to land in Berlin, where German finance minister Lars Klingbeil is expected to read them out, marking the latest bid by Europe’s six largest economies to deliver what twenty-seven have failed to in over a decade: a real market for European capital.

The grouping calls itself the E6, and was launched in late January by Klingbeil and his French counterpart Roland Lescure. Its four declared priorities are the Savings and Investments Union, the international role of the euro (and the digital euro), joint defence procurement, and secure supply of critical raw materials.

The Diagnosis

European households are sitting on roughly €11 trillion in cash deposits, the largest pool of idle wealth in the developed world. The money earns close to nothing and finances close to nothing. Across the wider continent, private savings stand at €33 trillion. Every year, around €300 billion of European capital walks out of the door, the bulk of it heading to Wall Street. The US stock market accounts for around 54% of global market capitalisation. Large European markets sit at 15.7%.

The intellectual case has already been made. Twice. In April 2024, former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta published Much more than a market, a report commissioned by the Council. He diagnosed the problem in detail: twenty-seven national markets, twenty-seven sets of insolvency rules, twenty-seven tax regimes, and a population that quite reasonably parks its money in the bank rather than navigate that maze.

Five months later, Mario Draghi delivered The Future of European Competitiveness. He estimated that Europe needs an additional €750-€800 billion in annual investment to keep pace with the United States and China. Without it, he wrote, the bloc faces an “existential challenge”.

The Dark Trading Fight

The opening fight is technical and revealing. France and Spain have drafted a joint position paper, seen by POLITICO, targeting so-called ‘systematic internalisers’. These are the in-house trading platforms run by investment banks, most of them sitting in the City of London, on which firms like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs handle European equity trades without showing the prices to the wider market. Paris and Madrid want sunlight. London’s banks have grown comfortable.

The Real Argument

The smaller capitals are nervous, and not without reason. Ireland and Portugal have warned that the E6 risks steamrolling the twenty-one other governments. Luxembourg, whose financial sector was built on regulatory arbitrage, has gone further. Its finance minister, Gilles Roth, has argued publicly that turning ESMA into a centralised supervisor would not help the EU reach its stated objectives. Those concerns are real. They are also parochial.

A continent that wants to negotiate with Washington and Beijing on equal terms cannot continue to run fifty-two separate financial supervisors. The numbers do not allow it. The geopolitics do not allow it. The Commission’s own proposal for an expanded ESMA, with an independent Executive Board overseeing the largest cross-border firms, has the European Central Bank’s full backing.

Read more

Follow us

BlueSky | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Twitch | Youtube

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading artic…

Read more

Follow us

BlueSky | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Twitch | Youtube

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading artic…

Read more

Follow us

BlueSky | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Twitch | Youtube

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading artic…

Read more

Follow us

BlueSky | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Twitch | Youtube

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading artic…

Read more

Follow us

BlueSky | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Twitch | Youtube

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading articles written by high-level experts, then make sure to support the publication by liking, subscribing, and sharing it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

Donald ‘#TACO’ Trump has once again chickened out, backing down from his threats to erase Iran’s 2500-year-old civilisation last night if the Iranian government didn’t capitulate.

Which of course, they didn’t, instead putting forward a ten-point peace plan to end the American-Iranian war that would amount to a complete and utter American capitulation, and would solidify Iran’s position as the regional hegemon.

So, realising that once again his geopolitical skills are non-existent and you can’t just be a bully to a foreign state in quite the same way you can be to young or vulnerable individuals, Donald Trump has chickened out, and here we are.

And as discussed in the Dépêche of the day, Donald Trump continues to reinforce the anti-American and illiberal order.

Thank you for reading the French Dispatch! If you liked what you read, you should like this post and subscribe to the newsletter by clicking/tapping the button below:

Subscribe now

And if you’d like to contribute a coffee or two to help fuel my coverage of the wild world of politics, feel free to click on the picture below:

Follow us

BlueSky | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Twitch | Youtube

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading articles written by high-level experts, then make sure to support the publication by liking, subscribing, and sharing it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

With Hungary heading to the polls in six days, on Sunday, 12 April 2026, Viktor Orban is growing increasingly desperate as he faces an almost certain defeat to Péter Magyar after 16 years in power.

For Europeans, these elections offer the prospect of a Hungary and a European Union finally free of Orban’s disruption, and the end of the autocratic regime that has enriched him, his oligarch friends, and Vladimir Putin. It promises an end to the Hungarian veto, which has hamstrung the European Union and prevented us from advancing our project, becoming stronger, and improving the prosperity of our citizens.

And as has been underlining, this is one of the first post-truth elections, which is why we’re taking a look at Viktor Orban’s attempted false flag in Serbia.

After explosives were found on a pipeline carrying Russian gas from Serbia into Hungary, Orban and his allies aggressively pointed the finger at Ukraine and attempted to undermine Magyar’s campaign, before Serbian intelligence killed the conspiracy with one small comment.

And of course, as you can imagine, this is all because his party, Fidesz, is looking at the end of their dominance in Hungary.

Thank you for reading the French Dispatch! If you liked what you read, you should like this post and subscribe to the newsletter by clicking/tapping the button below:

Subscribe now

And if you’d like to contribute a coffee or two to help fuel my coverage of the wild world of politics, feel free to click on the picture below:

Follow us

BlueSky | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Twitch | Youtube

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading artic…

Read more