EADS and its American partner Northrop Grumman have abandoned their joint bid for a $35 billion contract to build tanker jets for the U.S. military, citing unfair competition as their reason for withdrawing. German commentators on Wednesday sense more than a whiff of hypocrisy from European governments.

Politicians in Berlin and elsewhere in Europe are accusing Washington of protectionism over the collapse of a deal for the construction of 179 refueling tanker planes that pitted European aerospace giant EADS and its Airbus subsidiary against Boeing. Berlin is claiming the bidding process conducted by the U.S. Department of Defense was so custom-tailored to Boeing that EADS' American partner company, Northrop Grumman, had virtually no chance of scoring the lucrative $35 billion contract.

On Tuesday, German Economics Minister Rainer Bruderle expressed his disappointment over the Defense Department's behavior in the deal, which led to a decision by Northrop Grumman on Monday to withdraw completely from the bidding process. "Free competition cannot be unilaterally limited in the procurement of defense goods," the politician, a member of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party, told reporters. "Right now, in the midst of the current crisis, even hints of protectionism can be damaging."

The heads of economics issues in the parliamentary groups of Germany's three largest political parties in the Bundestag were even sharper in their criticism. Joachim Pfeiffer of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats, told reporters: "This is a scandalous, unacceptable act. This needs to become a political issue with the USA."

'You Can't Change the Rules Just Because You Don't Like the Winner'

"The government has to push the United States to cease its protectionist tendencies," the FDP's Paul Friedhoff told the Ruhr Nachrichten newspaper. Meanwhile, Garrelt Duin of the center-left Social Democratic Party, told the tabloid Bild: "This is a sleight of hand on the part of the Yanks. … The Americans only talk about free competition when it is to their advantage. You can't simply change the rules of the game just because you don't like the winner."

On Tuesday, an Airbus spokesman told Spiegel Online: "During the first bidding process two years ago, the best aircraft was sought." But this time around, the criteria had allegedly been specifically tailored to the Boeing 767. The Americans sought a "small aircraft whose only purpose was refueling," the spokesman said. But the only aim was to "shut us out." By doing so, he argued, the Americans "would for the first time in their history have worse equipment than the Brits or the Australians."