Macron hopes to sell Rafale fighter jets to Serbia despite alleged links to Russia
French President Emmanuel Macron is leaving political crisis-hit France on Thursday and Friday for a two-day trip to Serbia in the hope of selling fighter jets to President Aleksandar Vučić’s regime, despite Belgrade’s close relationship with Russia.
Embroiled in a political crisis at home, Macron hopes to return from Serbia with some good news on Friday. At the end of a meeting with his Serbian counterpart, Aleksandar Vučić, a contract worth €3 billion could be signed between Paris and Belgrade to sell 12 Rafale fighter jets, as the Serbian authorities have repeatedly requested in recent months.
“We hope to see these discussions come to a successful conclusion’, explained the Élysée on Wednesday (28 August), but without specifying the number of aircraft envisaged or the value of the contract.
“Serbia is making a strategic choice to cooperate with a European country [to modernise its army],” the president’s entourage added.
A successful sale would mark another major success for Dassault Aviation in the Balkans, following the sale of 12 second-hand Rafales to Croatia in 2021 for €1 billion.
But this has raised some eyebrows as Serbia showed no qualms about demonstrating its closeness to Moscow before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, notably through joint military exercises.
Serbia has been an official candidate for European integration since 2013, but in its 2023 report, the European Commission described Belgrade’s progress in the fight against corruption and organised crime as “limited”, noting that “cases of threats, intimidation, hate speech and violence against journalists remain a cause for concern”.
Despite these repeated attacks on press freedom, denounced by all international organisations alike, Vučić, who has ruled the country unchallenged since 2012, has become a key ally for France in the Balkans.
Paris, for example, welcomes the “steps taken in particular by Serbia to implement the Ohrid agreements”, which were theoretically concluded in February 2023 to “normalise” the country’s relations with neighbouring Kosovo but have never been implemented since.
Belgrade has effectively regained a strategic centrality that it had lost since the break-up of Yugoslavia.
While Serbia supported the UN resolution of March 2022 condemning the Kremlin’s aggression in Ukraine, the Serbian regime has always refused to apply European sanctions against Moscow, playing a skilful balancing act with EU countries.
The latter is, therefore, reluctant to denounce the authoritarian excesses of the Serbian regime for fear of seeing the country fall into the arms of its ‘big brother’ Russia.
It has also welcomed several Russian government delegations, sending its own to Moscow in return, and senior officials, including Vucic, have been forthcoming with statements that can be interpreted as support, or at least a lack of opposition towards Russia’s foreign policy moves.
Above all, Serbia has strategic resources that will undoubtedly interest European capitals, such as large lithium deposits. It also has a keen interest in northern Kosovo, home to a Serb majority, and the Trepca complex, Europe’s largest lead-zinc and silver ore mine.
On 19 July, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the CEO of Mercedes were in Belgrade to witness the signing of a partnership agreement between Serbia and the EU. The partnership provides for the development of a process to extract value from the ore and the establishment of an electric battery production plant in Serbia.
“Today, the EU and Germany exchanged democracy, rule of law and EU perspective for the Balkans for lithium,” Florian Bieber, a political scientist specialising in the Balkans, said on X after the meeting.
For many years, Serbian citizens have been fighting against the opening of a mine in the Jadar valley in the south-west of the country by Anglo-Australian giant Rio Tinto. According to Vučić, this mine would be capable of producing 58,000 tonnes of lithium a year, enough to supply “17% of Europe’s annual production of electric vehicles”.
Weakened by an unprecedented mobilisation of Serbian civil society against the project, which opponents claimed would cause irreversible environmental damage, the Serbian government finally revoked Rio Tinto’s operating licences in January 2022. However, it announced the resumption of the partnership last June after receiving ‘new guarantees’ from the company.
The demonstrations resumed in the middle of the summer, bringing together tens of thousands of people in Belgrade in early August. Determined to continue the fight, the Federation of Environmental Associations of Serbia sent an open letter to Macron on 28 August, asking him to support environmentalists, adding that “Europe must offer a more attractive partnership than the shameless exploitation that some advocate.”
Besides it is highly unlikely that Macron would risk offending his newfound business partner, the Elysée has confirmed that it will not interfere in national affairs, saying that the opening of a lithium mine is “a decision that belongs to Serbia”.
(Laurent Geslin | Euractiv.fr)
Read more with Euractiv
