Mercosur enters a European summit on funds for Ukraine and many consider the agreement with the EU dead

The French president who agree to sign a trade agreement with Mercosur which includes trade in agricultural products, which opens the European market to the production of the countryside of a world power such as the South American bloc.

This Thursday’s European summit should only serve to force Hungary enough to break the deadlock financial package that the European Union has prepared for Ukraine: 50 billion euros to support Kiev for the next four years and another 20 billion for weapons, which will finally be distributed bilaterally and not en bloc.

While this week an agreement was sought with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbanthe summit began to take another turn at the same time as the European countryside was heating up with the protests of recent days They tried to besiege the big capitals with tractors, especially Paris and Brussels.

The pressure from the French camp forced the government of the new Prime Minister Gabriel Attal to announce that his country he will not sign the agreement which has been negotiated for more than two decades and which already had a first agreement in July 2019 that came to nothing.

Attal’s words before the French National Assembly They are the prelude to the summit this Thursday, in which President Emmanuel Macron will ask the European Commission to do so negotiations with Mercosur have been completed.

European trade agreements approved by qualified majority and France alone could not veto, but no one thinks of putting it to the vote against French opinion, there is not a sufficient majority in the European Parliament to approve it and Paris is not alone. Behind French diplomacy, which is more explicit on this issue, hide other countries such as Belgium, Ireland, Austria, Poland, Luxembourg or the Netherlands.

An agreement that is considered dead

The European Commission has already given way this Wednesday, reducing imports of agricultural products Ukrainians and suspending the rule it imposes for a year keep 4% of fields uncultivatedbut from the top The coffin of the agreement with Mercosur could emerge.

France has always refused. And although the chief spokesperson of the European Commission, Eric Mamer, said during a press conference on Tuesday that negotiations continue, diplomats have been consulting in recent days in Brussels They leave him for dead.

Mamer himself had to admit it “at this momentor the conditions are not met conclude negotiations with Mercosur”.

In reality, from the analysis of European trade policy over the last two decades it can be concluded that these conditions will never be satisfied because the European Union they have never signed a peer-to-peer trade agreement, not even with smaller blocs or countries but powerful in some sectors, such as Mercosur in agriculture.

The European Union It has no trade agreements, for example, with the United States or China, because this would lead her to give in like her counterpart. Being the first commercial and economic block on the planet (448 million people and one of the highest living standards) it can afford to sign trade agreements.it’s just with countries who accept major concessions in exchange for access to that market.

The largest countries it has signed with are Japan, Canada or Mexico. Countries that have agreed to give up much more than the Europeans in exchange for access to the old continent’s market. Successive governments in the Mercosur countries They have never accepted this level of concessions.