“The finish line of the EU-Mercosur agreement is in sight.” With these words, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced her arrival in Latin America, where she will attend the summit of the Mercosur bloc states with which the trade agreement that has been resisted for some time is being finalized. decades with the aim of closing it in the next few hours. Von der Leyen and Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic will meet with the leaders of the Mercosur countries at the summit in Montevideo (Paraguay) with the intention of “finalizing political negotiations” to conclude the agreement.
“We have the opportunity to create a market of 700 million people. “The largest trade and investment partnership the world has ever seen,” Von der Leyen said on the social network X (formerly Twitter). The head of the community executive has chosen Elon Musk’s platform to confirm a trip that the European Commission had kept in the dark, despite the news about progress in negotiations with the bloc made up of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay.
The negotiations had become entrenched in technical details, especially due to environmental demands, but they returned to a political level at the last moment coinciding with the meeting in Montevideo. “The work has advanced, the debates are underway also at the political level. Commissioner Maros Sefcovic is fully involved in making the talks progress and ensuring a good result for Europe, said the Director General of Trade of the European Commission, Sabine Weyand, in the European Parliament, reports the EFE Agency.
The intention of the European Commission, which is responsible for negotiating the trade agreement, is to reinforce its weight in the region in the face of the advance of other powers, fundamentally China, and at a time when the return of Donald Trump to the House Blanca threatens to escalate the trade war with more tariffs on Europe.
France, which is mired in a political crisis after the vote of no confidence, is the main EU country that opposes the ratification of the trade agreement. Holland and Austria have also rejected it. Italy considers that adjustments still need to be made, as published by the Italian agency ANSA. On the contrary, Spain has pushed for the agreement to go ahead, as has Germany.
On the Latin American side, Javier Milei’s Argentina, critical of multilateral agreements, is the one that raised the most doubts while the Brazilian Lula da Silva is one of the most defenders and has downplayed France’s ‘no’, recalling that It is the European Commission that calls the shots.
The agreement between the EU and Mercosur has been resisted since the last century. It was in 1999 when the European Commission received the mandate to begin negotiations that lasted 20 years until an agreement in principle was reached in June 2019, which was applauded, among others, by Spain.
However, the fine print – and the signing of an agreement of these characteristics with the then far-right president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro – met with resistance, fundamentally, in the European Parliament and in countries such as Germany, France, Austria, Holland or Ireland. , among others. The deforestation of the Amazon and the climate emergency were the main reasons at that time, in addition to the more or less explicit recognition of concern for the European agricultural sector. French farmers are up in arms against the signing of the agreement.
With the EU divided, the agreement suffered a slowdown. Other conversations then began – buried in the opacity that usually characterizes negotiations in which huge amounts of money are at stake – to add to the agreement a joint instrument in which some of the concerns related to the care of the environment or human rights would be reflected. of workers, especially the fight against the exploitation of minors, which for social organizations is absolutely insufficient.
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