Emirates has secured the ability to land at Berlin Airport, Germany, after decades of pressure and opposition from local rival Lufthansa.
The German Government in recent hours announced, without directly naming Emirates, that it had granted “an airline from the United Arab Emirates” a fifth landing point in the country with immediate effect.
The fifth German airport
A statement that confirms that of the Minister of Foreign Trade of the United Arab Emirates, Thani Al Zeyoud, according to which the two parties were “defining the final details” to assign the coveted slot to Emirates.
Because the German government gave in
The reasons that pushed the German federal government to allow the Emirates to land in Berlin combine economic diplomacy, territorial pressure and market correctives. In the foreground, in fact, there is the geopolitics of investments: the agreement unlocks strategic cooperation with the UAE, linked to bilateral capital commitments amounting to tens of billions of euros. Added to this is the political pressure of the capital and the management of Berlin airport, historically penalized by Lufthansa’s strategy of centralizing intercontinental flights in Frankfurt and Munich.
Furthermore, the executive intended to remedy a regulatory disparity, given that rival Qatar Airways already operated at five German airports (including Berlin). To balance the turning point and avoid the break with Lufthansa, Berlin has nevertheless imposed strict operational limitations: only one flight per day, the exclusion of continued routes to third countries and the blocking of the increase in frequencies at the other four airports in Germany.
Berlin, therefore, is the fifth German airport to which Emirates will be able to fly. Until now, the Emirati airline operated flights to Frankfurt, Munich, Düsseldorf and Hamburg. The carrier will now be able to operate seven additional weekly flights. In a statement, Lufthansa said that granting Emirates the additional slot “will shift economic value and job creation to the Gulf, further exacerbating the distortion of competition.”
“Unfair competition”
The issue was decades old. Lufthansa, in fact, historically opposed Emirates’ entry into Berlin mainly to protect its own business model hub-and-spoke based on Frankfurt and Munich airports. The bilateral agreement on air traffic rights limited, as mentioned, the Dubai company to only four German airports.
Lufthansa he always put pressure on on the federal government to avoid adding Berlin as a fifth destination, arguing that Emirates engages in unfair competition through indirect government subsidies and excellent operating conditions in the UAE.
The German group’s main concern is that a direct flight from Berlin will drain high-value business and diplomatic passengers to the Dubai hub for Asian connections, thus bypassing its regional feeder flights to Munich and Frankfurt and weakening its long-haul connections.