The French government, goaded by presidential candidates into responding to massive job cuts at Airbus, said on Monday it was ready to pump cash into the ailing planemaker and shake up a Franco-German power-sharing pact.
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin also called on Airbus parent EADS to abandon paying a dividend this year to its shareholders, which include the French government, after announcing plans to cut 10,000 jobs including 4,300 in France.
Villepin said the government stood ready to participate if the Franco-German-Spanish company EADS decided to tap its shareholders for more cash through a capital increase to shore up a company hit by delays to the new Airbus A380 superjumbo airliner.
"The state will play its role," he said, evoking a scenario which could please French voters. However, EADS' biggest private shareholder, German car firm DaimlerChrysler, has battled for years to prevent what it regards as state meddling.
EADS has said it may need to make a cash call after losing EUR5 billion euros (USD$6.54 billion) in future profits on the A380 production problems, but that it does not plan to launch one soon.
Villepin was speaking after calling in ministers for crisis talks on the Airbus job cuts, which has shot to the top of the France's political agenda ahead of its April and May presidential elections.
Presidential front-runners have been jostling to appear most engaged in defending Airbus jobs but presenting different visions for the future of the European aerospace industry champion.
Socialist Segolene Royal, true to her campaign pledge to decentralize power from Paris, wants a group of French regions to buy shares in EADS, mirroring the involvement of German federal states which have bought symbolic stakes.
Centrist rival Francois Bayrou said regions should steer clear of the Airbus crisis, which conservative front-runner Nicolas Sarkozy likened to Alstom -- the builder of France's high-speed trains, which was rescued in a 2004 bailout.
"We shouldn't be fatalistic. We saved Alstom and I have not decided to let Airbus fail. We recapitalised Alstom. If we need to boost the state's stake in Airbus, why not?" said Sarkozy, who was finance minister at the time of the Alstom rescue.
Sarkozy promised to renegotiate the special shareholding pact which limits state involvement in EADS just a week after urging politicians to steer clear of the problem and also said Franco-German management parity in EADS would have had to go.
"There needs to be a real shareholder, who would be the industrial boss of the company, who decides on management and we should stop this Franco-German parity and just take the best people to take the best decisions," Sarkozy told France 3 television.
The first round of the presidential election is due on April 22 and currently Royal is trailing Sarkozy in the polls.
Three French unions have called an EADS-wide strike for Tuesday, and expect up to 10,000 protesters in Toulouse.
In Germany Airbus factories returned to normal after a four day stoppage in some plants, a spokesman said.
The French government has expressed irritation that its hands are effectively tied by the shareholder pact designed by its Socialist predecessors when EADS was founded in 2000, but it risks opening EADS up to foreign predators if it weakens the takeover defences enshrined in the same pact.
The pact was drawn up by a previous French Socialist government -- a fact that has limited Royal's room to criticize the incumbent conservative administration.
