Strasbourg (France) (AFP) – The EU hopes Tuesday to strike a deal towards implementing its nearly year-old trade pact with the United States, with an increasingly impatient Donald Trump threatening steep new tariffs unless it is done by July 4. The 27-nation bloc struck an accord with Washington last July, setting levies on most European goods at 15 percent. However, to the US president’s frustration, a final version of the text still needs to be nailed down on the EU side.
“A deal is a deal,” the US mission to the EU posted on X Monday, stating that the bloc “must live up” to the agreement sealed in Turnberry, Scotland, between Trump and EU chief Ursula von der Leyen. Negotiators from the EU’s parliament and capitals will meet Tuesday night in Strasbourg to push for a compromise that would allow the bloc to meet Trump’s deadline and hopefully turn the page on more than a year of transatlantic trade battles.
Short of that, Trump has warned the EU should expect “much higher” tariffs and has already vowed to raise duties on European cars and trucks from 15 to 25 percent. The tariff blitz unleashed by Trump before the Turnberry accord, which included hefty levies on steel, aluminium, and car parts, jolted the bloc into cultivating trade ties around the world. But the EU cannot afford to neglect the 1.6-trillion-euro ($1.9-trillion) relationship with the United States, its largest trade partner.
Cyprus, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU, stated that its goal “remains the swift implementation of the EU-US joint statement.” To reach a compromise with member states, parliament is under pressure to renounce several amendments it added to the text in March, which the Americans consider unacceptable. The head of parliament’s trade committee, Bernd Lange, struck an optimistic note, saying the sides had “already made a lot of progress.”
“I hope we can reach a compromise, including new propositions,” Lange added, but first he needs to hammer out a common stance among the parliament’s different factions, which looked set to keep haggling until the last moment.
The EU parliament’s conditional green light came after months of delay caused by Trump’s designs on Greenland and a US Supreme Court ruling striking down many of the president’s levies. The assembly’s largest force, the conservative European People’s Party (EPP), to which von der Leyen belongs, is now pushing hard to implement an accord it says is vital to ending a period of damaging uncertainty for EU businesses. EPP lawmaker Zeljana Zovko told AFP she was “confident that we will get it done.”
The EPP has firm support from the hard-right ECR party, whose shadow rapporteur on the file, Kris Van Dijck, also expressed that he was “cautiously optimistic.” However, several political groups had yet to make their position public as of Monday night, and it remained unclear how far the majority would compromise to get a deal. Lawmaker Kathleen Van Brempt of the Socialists and Democrats, parliament’s second-biggest group, indicated they would “engage constructively” but fight for safeguards “to guarantee stability, predictability, and protection for European businesses and workers.”
One bone of contention is a suspension clause toughened by parliament that would scrap favourable tariff conditions for US exporters should the United States later breach the terms of the deal. Another concern involves so-called “sunrise” and “sunset” clauses under which the EU side of the accord would kick in once the United States fully meets its pledges and would expire unless renewed in 2028. Green lawmaker Anna Cavazzini remarked that “the odds are good” but warned that member states would need to “budge” on parliament’s main priorities. “These past weeks have shown time and again that Trump is not to be trusted, so the EU needs stronger tools at hand,” she added.
© 2024 AFP
