While farmers are demonstrating and the European Commission wants to accelerate the signing of the free trade agreement between the EU and the Mercosur countries, the entire French political class is opposed to it.
Its representatives fear unfair competition and the arrival on the European market of products that do not comply with the standards in force on the continent.
However, the opposition believes that Emmanuel Macron is not doing everything in his power to prevent ratification.
French farmers launched this Monday, November 18, “Act 2” of anger against the EU-Mercosur free trade treaty. The European Commission hopes to sign the agreement between the European Union and Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia) by the end of the year, but farmers fear a surge of Latin American meat and warn against unfair competition from products not subject to the strict environmental and health standards in force in Europe. In their fight, they are supported by the entire French political class.
The President of the Republic has been repeating it for months and said it again this weekend: the agreement is “bad” and France “will continue” to oppose it. “I want to reassure all our farmers: we will not give up our food sovereignty. France will not support the EU-Mercosur agreement in its current version,” he wrote on X on Sunday evening, after his meeting with his Argentinian counterpart Javier Milei. On the airport tarmac in Buenos Aires, he added: “We cannot ask our farmers (…) to change their practices, to do without certain phytosanitary products”in order to have a production “high quality”et “at the same time opening our market to massive imports of products which do not respect the same criteria”. The Head of State criticizes an agreement which does not take into account the subject of biodiversity and the climate, and the rules which in his eyes are not “homogeneous” with European rules (he therefore wants to introduce the famous “mirror clauses”).
An agreement which “will only serve the interests of a few large firms”
Environmentalists are against the treaty for the same reasons: it is “deleterious for our biodiversity and our forests, but also for our farmers and our employees unfairly put in competition with markets with lower environmental and social standards”said the party's European deputies last October in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Michel Barnier to request an end to negotiations on the agreement. The Socialist Party also advocates a “zero tolerance for imported products that do not comply with European standards and particularly the use of pesticides”. Insoumise France denounces an agreement which “will only serve the interests of a few large firms to the detriment of the general interest” and will lead “a brutal competition for our agriculture, an influx of foodstuffs not subject to any appropriate health control, the acceleration in the Amazon of deforestation which is disastrous for the environment and the global climate”.
On the right, the Republicans see this treaty as an attack on the sovereignty of France. Also, “I don’t want to give my children beef that grew up with growth accelerators”declared the president of Hauts-de-France Xavier Bertrand this Monday morning on TF1. In a recent meeting, the president of the National Rally Jordan Bardella estimated, targeting the EU-Mercosur treaty, that “the vital prognosis of French agriculture is now in jeopardy. If we do not take protectionist measures now to protect our agriculture from unfair international competition, our agriculture will not survive”. According to him, the agreement “would overwhelm our market with products that in no way respect the standards that we impose on French farmers and destroy part of our sectors”.
Emmanuel Macron not active enough to bring together a blocking minority?
But despite their agreement on the merits, what tenses part of the political class is the supposed lack of will of Emmanuel Macron to prevent the ratification of the treaty. This Monday morning on LCI, the environmentalist deputy Sandrine Rousseau criticized the “chin effects” by Emmanuel Macron. “For the moment, there is no declaration or no measure that really allows not to sign Mercosur”she denounced. “You have not renegotiated the negotiating mandate with the European Union, that is to say that the European Union still has the same negotiating mandate and you are not organizing within Europe a blocking minority”she lamented.
To ratify the text, the European Commission could choose to go through a procedure that does not require a unanimous vote of the 27, during which France could use the right of veto it has, but a qualified majority vote. For this, 15 countries, representing at least 65% of the population, must vote in favor. But at present there are too few of them to constitute a blocking minority and France must convince beyond Luxembourg, Cyprus or Malta.
-
Read also
EU-Mercosur agreement: can France really block its entry into force?
Saturday, on franceinfo, the president of the Economic Affairs Committee, Aurélie Trouvé (LFI) strongly criticized the attitude of the Head of State, who according to her was slow to try to organize the rebellion at the European level against this text . “It might be time to actually organize a blocking minority”she said. “Mr Macron, stop your circus with Mercosur. We demand that this treaty be discussed in the National Assembly and that it not apply if the French do not vote for it”enjoined Jean-Luc Mélenchon (LFI) to the President of the Republic, during an interview on France 3 on Sunday. The group of Insoumis deputies had planned the examination in its parliamentary slot on November 28 of a proposed resolution inviting the government to refuse this treaty. The government deemed it inadmissible on November 5, just as a similar resolution proposal from the RN group had been deemed inadmissible at the beginning of October.
600 parliamentarians united to demand a vote from Parliaments
French parliamentarians are also united in their request to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen not to override national representation. Because by choosing to vote on the text by qualified majority, the European Commission would prevent the Parliaments of all its member states from voting for or against the agreement (at the end of the classic procedure, the Council of the EU must decide by a majority and the text obtain the approval of the European Parliament and then be ratified by the parliaments of each Member State). Also, on November 12, more than 600 French parliamentarians (deputies, senators and European deputies), from several parliamentary groups (PS, Liot, MoDem, Horizons, UDI, PCF), wrote to him to tell him that they couldn't imagine that she could do without their opinion. “We also cannot conceive of the Commission and the Council siding with the opposition of France, the great founding country of the Union”they add.
For the parliamentarians who signed this letter, France posed “three conditions for signing the agreement” : “not increase imported deforestation in the European Union, bring the agreement into line with the Paris Climate Agreement and introduce mirror measures in health and environmental matters. Obviously, these conditions are not met “. They denounce “the opening of additional quotas without customs duties or at reduced rates for beef, poultry, corn, sugar and ethanol, would inevitably be to the detriment of European producers and breeders, against a backdrop of distortions of competition and 'guilty naivety' with the lack of controls on imported products” and an agreement that would weigh “a substantial risk for the security of agricultural supplies and food traceability in Europe”.
After a “political” agreement sealed in 2019 between the EU and the Mercosur countries, the opposition of several countries, including France, blocked its final adoption, even if countries like Germany and Spain hope that It will be signed by the end of the year.
