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by lucumo
16 days ago
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The French state owns a 26.6% of the shares in Thales, with 36.4% of the voting rights. The Dassault family has another 30% of the voting rights. A combined controlling share. The Dassault family has very close ties with the French government and defense industry. There's no doubt in my mind that if the French government gets serious and says "Jump!" Dassault would just ask "How high?" The situation with Airbus is a little more healthy, with the French government share being much lower (11%), and the German (11%) and Spanish (4%) governments balancing it out a bit. Airbus is also a smaller part of Dutch defense. Still, none of those governments is Dutch. The fact that the French government owns more of the Dutch defense industry than the Dutch government is a problem. |
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I'll push back on that point.
The FCAS program was originally conceived as a French-German joint political initiative by Macron and Merkel. The NGF plane within it has been dead in the water for years because Airbus and Dassault can't work out their disagreements. It's a conflict between two industrial companies that's blocking forward progress, with the Airbus and Dassault CEOs duking it out across press releases and shareholder meetings.
If Dassault was a French state puppet, Macron would've strong-armed Dassault into working with Airbus on this €100 billion project by now. Yet, the French President seems to know better than to try and do that. One does not get to be basically the only major private independent defense company in a famously nationalized French defense industry during the Cold War without managing to hold the French state at arm's length, especially during the nationalization years of Mitterand's presidency.
Though your concerns about ownership of the Dutch defense industry are certainly valid, I don't see how the European defense industry could have completely avoided consolidation after the end of the Cold War, given the budget cuts to defense. The Americans went much further on that front and nowadays the lack of internal competition is causing them all kinds of problems for them.