The French president has not yet been born who
agrees to sign a trade agreement with Mercosur
that includes trade in agricultural products, that opens the European market to the production of the countryside of a world power like the South American bloc.
This Thursday's European summit should only serve to force Hungary enough to unlock once and for all the
financial package
that the European Union has prepared
for Ukraine
: 50 billion euros to support Kiev for the next four years and 20 billion more for weapons, which will ultimately be distributed bilaterally, not en bloc.
While an agreement was sought this week with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban
, the summit began to take another turn
while the European countryside heated up with protests that in recent days
attempted to lay siege to large capitals,
especially Paris , with tractors.
and Brussels.
Pressure from the French camp made the government of the newly appointed Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announce that his country
will not sign the agreement
that has been negotiated for more than two decades and that already had a first agreement in July 2019 that came to nothing.
Rural protests in France.
Photo: AP
Attal's words before the French National Assembly
are the prelude to this Thursday's summit,
in which President Emmanuel Macron will ask the European Commission to
end the negotiations with Mercosur
.
European trade agreements are approved
by a qualified majority
and France alone could not veto it, but no one thinks of putting it to a vote against French opinion, in the European Parliament there is not a sufficient majority to approve it either and Paris is not alone .
Behind French diplomacy, which is more vocal on this matter, hide other countries such as Belgium, Ireland, Austria, Poland, Luxembourg or the Netherlands.
An agreement that is considered dead
The European Commission
already gave in this Wednesday by reducing imports of
Ukrainian agricultural products and suspending for one year the rule that requires
keeping 4% of fields fallow
, but
the coffin of the agreement with Mercosur could emerge from the summit.
France always refused.
And although on Tuesday, during a press conference, the chief spokesman of the European Commission, Eric Mamer, said that the negotiations were continuing, the diplomats consulted in Brussels these days
consider him dead.
Mamer himself had to acknowledge that “right now
the conditions are not met
to conclude negotiations with Mercosur.”
Row of trucks stranded on a route in France by a countryside picket.
Photo: Christophe ARCHAMBAULT / AFP
In reality, from the analysis of European trade policy over the last two decades, it can be concluded that
these conditions will never be met
because the European Union
has never signed a trade agreement between equals, not even with smaller
but powerful blocs or countries in some sector, such as It is Mercosur in agriculture.
The European Union
does not have trade agreements, for example, with the United States or China
, because that would lead it to give in like its counterpart.
As the largest commercial and economic bloc on the planet (448 million people and one of the highest standards of living) it can afford to sign trade agreements
only with countries
that accept important concessions in exchange for having access to that market.
The largest countries it has signed with are
Japan, Canada and Mexico.
Countries that agreed to give up much more than the Europeans in exchange for access to the old continent market.
Successive governments in the Mercosur countries
never accepted such a level of concessions.