After failing for years to win a single order for the Dassault-built Rafale fighter jet, France has scored a string of multi-billion-euro wins in recent weeks and is on a quest for more.
Global appetite for the jets has surged as a result of the United States’ diminishing influence in the Arab world along with wider security concerns over the rise of Islamic State insurgents - which Paris is more than happy to assuage. Egypt, India and Qatar have all just signed contracts.
After signing deals worth some 15 billion euros for a total of 84 aircraft, France now has the United Arab Emirates in its sights for dozens more purchases that are a much-needed boost to jobs at home, where unemployment is stuck at a high 10 percent.
“Above all, this is good news for the French economy,” Hollande said in Doha of the fruits of his “economic diplomacy” policy, which has turned Fabius and Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian into France’s top traveling salesmen.
Le Drian predicted at the weekend that recent arms deals could create up to 30,000 French jobs. This success may account for a striking lack of domestic criticism so far about the Socialist government promoting arms sales to entrenched monarchies, many of whom have patchy human rights records.
“If we want France to have influence, this is one of the best ways to get it,” Eduardo Rihan-Cypel, a Socialist lawmaker on parliament’s defense committee told Reuters of the sales.
Hollande’s conservative predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy deployed the Rafale to wars in Afghanistan and Libya over the past decade but was unable to find a single foreign buyer for it. Now, growing security jitters are unlocking order books.
“We are at war with Islamic State,” former Sarkozy minister and party ally Xavier Bertrand told French TV. “Countries have realized they have to equip themselves.”
Once the dominant Western player in the Arab world, the United States has seen its influence wane following its reluctance to intervene in Syria, last year’s failure to secure a Middle East peace deal and its readiness to strike a nuclear deal with Iran.
That has left a strategic window for fellow UN Security Council veto-holder France, advocate of a tough line on Tehran and whose bombers were on the runway ready to fly to Syria in August 2013, before Barack Obama backed down on Western strikes.
“But they (Gulf states) are looking at us now more closely because we have worked with them closely on a strategic level and that naturally helps on a commercial level.”
French officials are under no illusion that the star treatment offered to Hollande during the trip is part of a wider Gulf game meant in part to send a message to Washington.
“They wanted us to come to say to the Americans ‘look, in any case we have France, so make sure you don’t get edged out’,” one senior French official said.