On Tuesday 30 August, French secretary of state for trade Matthias Fekl announced that at the informal EU trade ministers meeting in Bratislava on 22-23 September he would ask for a halt to the EU-US free trade (TTIP) negotiations so that these negotiations could later be resumed on a better basis.
"There is no longer any political support in France [for the TTIP negotiations]. France is calling for a pure, simple and definitive halt to these negotiations", Fekl said on French radio station RMC on Tuesday.
"These negotiations have been carried out in the dark. They have created a great deal of mistrust, suspicion and fear. The role of the EU and US is together to set the best rules possible for 21st century world trade on food, health, energy, public services and culture. This is not the direction the negotiations have taken. A definitive halt is needed in order to resume the negotiations on a good basis", he added.
"From a procedural point of view, it is perfectly possible for the Commission to negotiate until the end and nobody can legally oppose this, but there is no longer any political support from France for these negotiations. France believes the negotiations must be stopped, and that there should no longer be any meetings between the negotiators", Fekl continued.
"We will see if other countries fall in with us or not. We are speaking on behalf of a number of countries that cannot speak like this but that think the same way", he said, adding that there continued to be "a great deal of pressure to reach an agreement from the US side and from German Chancellor Angela Merkel".
Fekl said the responsibility for the failure lay with the attitude of the US in refusing to make any concessions. "The negotiations are not up to the level of historic friendship between Europe and the US (...) The Commission has been very much on the offensive in these negotiations, but the US has given nothing, or extremely little. That is not how allies should negotiate. It is not the Commission that is to blame in this", he said.
Unlike with the TTIP negotiations, Fekl thought the free trade agreement between the EU and Canada (CETA), which was concluded at the end of 2014 and is due to be signed in October, was "a good agreement". "On what it gives SMEs, on opening public procurement for European companies, on the end of private arbitration which has been replaced with the French proposal for an investment court, and on the recognition of our controlled designations in agriculture, it is the opposite of TTIP", he said.
Asked to respond to Fekl's words, the Commission declined to comment, simply stating that it was staying the course with a view to concluding an agreement before the end of 2016, as had been asked of it by the European Council in June. "The ball is still rolling. The Commission is working on the basis of a unanimous mandate from the European Council", Commission spokesperson Margaritis Schinas stated.
"The Commission is making steady progress in the ongoing negotiations", Schinas said on Monday, ignoring the comments of Germany's vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, who had said last weekend that the TTIP talks had "de facto failed, because the Europeans should not give in to Washington's demands".
Echoing these words, US trade representative Michael Froman told German magazine Der Spiegel, published on Wednesday, that "the negotiations [were making] steady progress", adding that "nothing was concluded until there was agreement on all the points".
The 14th round of TTIP negotiations in mid-July showed that the positions on market access remained very far apart, with the Europeans insisting on increased openness of US public procurement and the protection of geographical indications, and the Americans demanding more concessions from the EU on agricultural tariff liberalisation (EUROPE 11595).
Reding wants halt to TTIP negotiations. In the European Parliament, Viviane Reding (EPP, Luxembourg), a former European commissioner (three mandates between 1999 and 2014), called on the government of Luxembourg also to ask for a halt to the TTIP negotiations, given the “staunch opposition” of the US to publish the negotiation texts, to open its public procurement and telecommunications and transport markets , to replace the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism with “a public court”, and given the US opposition to the EU’s proposals on food safety and environmental protection, as well as to recognising the EU’s geographical indications.
“Given that our American counterparts refuse to apply the principle of equal treatment, these negotiations are doomed to fail. They won’t lead to a mutually beneficial outcome, with such an imbalance, so many disagreements and so little political will”, she said. Reding called on the EU to disengage from “these stalemate TTIP negotiations” and instead to concentrate on the agreements that preserve European interests, such as the CETA agreement with Canada, which should “henceforth serve as a blueprint”, given that it is “in line with” European, societal, cultural, environmental and agricultural standards, and that it opens new opportunities for European companies. (Original version in French by Emmanuel Hagry)