On Monday 14 April, the European Commissioner for Trade and Economic Security, Maroš Šefčovič, was in Washington to meet his American counterparts – Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer – in yet another attempt to negotiate. The European Union is still hoping to negotiate an agreement with the United States during the 90-day truce on tariffs (see EUROPE 16619/17).
According to Kevin Hassett, economic adviser to US President Donald Trump, the discussions between the EU and the US are moving in the right direction. “We’re making enormous progress. It’s going to be very good for American workers, especially American auto workers”, he said on Monday.
An agreement on cars also seems plausible to Brando Benifei (S&D, Italian), who is an MEP and Chair of the delegation for relations with the United States. He led a delegation of MEPs on a visit to Washington last week, during which he met members of the US House of Representatives. Agence Europe will be reporting on these meetings tomorrow in the form of an interview with Brando Benifei.
In Luxembourg, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Irishman Simon Harris, also expressed optimism on Monday in the margins of the Foreign Affairs Council (see other news). “Certainly, when I was in DC only a couple of days ago, I got the very clear impression that negotiation was something that the United States was now very interested in”, he told the press.
The two blocs have three months to reach an agreement, failing which the so-called reciprocal tariffs will come into force, along with the first European countermeasures. On Monday 14 April, the EU published both its countermeasures and the suspension of these measures, in two separate legal acts.
View the implementing regulation providing for the imposition of European countermeasures: https://aeur.eu/f/GET ; and the regulation suspending them: https://aeur.eu/f/geu (Original version in French by Léa Marchal and Camille-Cerise Gessant)