German Chancellor Angela Merkel (R) and French President Emmanuel Macron leave the Elysee Palace in Paris on July 13, 2017 | Patrick Kovarik/AFP via Getty Images Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron rekindle German-French romance German chancellor and French president agree on tighter collaboration between the two countries’ air forces.

PARIS — German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron agreed that France and Germany would collaborate on a new generation of fighter jets when they met in Paris Thursday.

The two European leaders vowed to give what Merkel called “a new impetus” to their bilateral relationship. Merkel said she “saluted” this project and used the opportunity to underline Paris and Berlin’s intention to intensify their cooperation in military matters.

“This is a revolution, but we’re not afraid of revolutions when they are peaceful, well-thought and meant to last,” Macron said.

The leaders were in Paris for a biannual joint cabinet meeting, a ritual of the French-German relationship for decades. This year's meeting was meant to signal yet again that both Berlin and Paris wish to boost an alliance that has been at the core of European integration for decades, but appeared to sour to a point of mutual indifference during the last ten years.

Even though Macron refrained from pushing his plans for further eurozone integration too hard in this German election year, he will have been pleased by Merkel’s guarded approval of his idea to create a eurozone finance minister. “We can talk about it,” Merkel said, signaling that she might accept negotiations even on issues that have been taboo in Germany until now.

The Franco German Defence and Security Council, created in 1988, met earlier Thursday, and included both countries’ interior ministries for the first time, as well as their defense and foreign affairs ministries, a move designed to emphasize Merkel and Macron’s intention to cooperate more closely in the fight against terrorism.

The new plan will aim to build a “new generation of joint fighter jets,” Macron said in a press conference held after lunch on Thursday. The idea is that over the long term, they would be used by both air forces and hopefully be exported the world over.

France and Germany also agreed to push ahead with the Eurodrone program, which aims to get Europe’s first military program for drones up and running by 2025.

Working alongside Spain and Italy, the program plans to power the drones using a twin-engine concept, according to the two countries. Berlin has promised to lead on the initiative and aims to start tendering out contracts for a system that will rival U.S. hardware in 2019, according to a joint statement.

The two sides also agreed to cooperate on military space surveillance missions and beam data collected from their own programs to the EU's European External Action Service for use in their missions around the world.

To ensure the "strategic autonomy" of Europe's military space applications, the Paris-Berlin alliance should also work on fitting the EU’s nascent Galileo constellation of satellites, which provides a European alternative to the U.S. GPS system, with a high level of security, the governments said.

The day was otherwise rich in symbolic gestures, including a visit by both leaders to a vocational training center in Paris where French young people are learning German. The visit helped the French president remind his guest that he had cancelled a reform planned under former President François Hollande that resulted in fewer bilingual classes in the French education system. Merkel publicly thanked Macron for his decision.

As expected both leaders reiterated their commitments — both political and financial — to the Paris climate accord. They also announced a series of jointly financed research projects on the environment and energy.

Merkel also said that France and Germany are mulling reforms of their respective corporate taxation systems to bring them closer together. “It’s complicated, but it could boost the internal market,” she added.