Mistral: The French Economical Nonsense

Protest in front of the Mistral "Vladivostok" in St Nazaire Sept 2014. Photo: Pierre Raimbault

The goals of the French arms industry are 7 billion euros of exported arms per year.

If France goes ahead and delivers the Mistral war ships to Russia, the countries that are directly threatened by Putin having such powerful weapon will most likely react by not buying any arms from the French market.

For Poland alone, France will kick itself out of a market of more than 21 billion euros, three years of the total goal for the French arms industry if it does not cancel the Mistral deal.

As the newspaper "Le Monde" was underlining in a recent article, the French market is actually focused on the Middle East countries but the Russian open invasion of Ukraine has brought an increasing interest in Lituania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Romania and a few other countries to increase their efforts to upgrade their military systems in order to be able to face a potential Russian agression.

These markets are most likely to buy from the EU and France in the next years. Delivering the Mistrals to Russia at the moment will exclude France from dozens of billions of contracts in the years to come.

Besides, the "DCNS affair" which made a scandal in Poland did not help France to keep an image of a reliable partner. Somebody claiming to be from the boards of directors at DCNS (which is building the Mistrals) publicly stated that Poland was a second zone market and that DCNS did not care much about the eastern europe countries as they were mainly focused on the Middle east. DCNS had to officially react to this but its public image has been damaged in Poland.

Buying arms is a political decision and Poland and other Baltic countries might prefer to get under American protection and buy from the USA if France goes ahead with the delivery of the Mistral to Putin.