There is no competition. Portugal has not launched a tender, has not published a requirement and has not said when it intends to. Airbus is bidding anyway.

In Lisbon on Thursday, Ivan Gonzalez Exposito, the Eurofighter campaign manager for Portugal, told reporters that Airbus will put a formal Eurofighter Typhoon proposal in front of the Portuguese government in late October or early November. Unsolicited. Complete with a financing package designed to make the bill easier to swallow.

It is an unusual way to sell a fighter, and it tells you how badly Airbus wants this one.

Bidding into a vacuum

Airbus has been circling this for a while. In October 2025 it signed a memorandum of understanding with Portuguese manufacturers to build an industrial proposition, the standard move in European fighter sales: offer the customer a share of the work and the jobs that come with it. What is new is that the company has now attached a date and a financing structure, and has decided not to wait to be asked.

Gonzalez Exposito said the proposal will include public and private financing solutions for Portugal in order to alleviate the payment plan. That sentence is doing a lot of work. Portugal’s problem with a new fighter has never really been which aircraft is best. It is that fighters cost money a country of ten million people has to find somewhere, and an offer that restructures when the money is due can matter more than a spec sheet.

The argument against the F-35

Airbus cannot beat the F-35 on stealth, so it is not trying to. The pitch is that Portugal does not need stealth.

His framing is that Portugal’s actual daily job is air policing and NATO commitments, and that the F-35 is built around deep offensive operations into defended airspace. A Typhoon climbs fast, carries a heavy air-to-air load and costs less per hour to keep in the air than a low-observable aircraft whose coatings need their own maintenance regime. For an air force whose scrambles mostly involve intercepting things over the Atlantic, that is a real argument.

The counter-argument is one Airbus cannot make go away. According to reporting on Portugal’s internal assessment, the air force scored the candidates against 20 technical criteria and put the F-35A first, with the Gripen E second. The Portuguese government has been careful to say no final selection has been made. But a sales campaign that begins by contradicting the customer’s own technical evaluation is starting from behind.

Why Portugal matters more than 28 aeroplanes

On its own, this is a small order. What makes it interesting is timing. European governments are under pressure to justify buying American, and Airbus has spent two years arguing that a European air force flying European aircraft is a strategic position rather than a sentimental one. Portugal is a NATO founding member, it sits on the Atlantic approaches, and it has not committed yet. Every month it does not commit is a month the Eurofighter case can be made.

Dassault and Saab are making versions of the same argument. Lockheed Martin does not have to argue at all, because the aircraft already won the technical scoring and most of Portugal’s neighbours are already flying it.

The proposal lands in about five weeks. Then Portugal has to decide whether it wants to run a competition at all.

Coverage of the industrial agreement Airbus signed with Portuguese manufacturers in late 2025, the groundwork for this month’s proposal.

Sources: Reuters; Air Data News; Defence Industry Europe; FlightGlobal; Portuguese Air Force. Fleet size is reported inconsistently across sources and is given here as a range.