Hang in there: European Commission He is the only negotiator of trade agreements under the Treaties of the European Union, after having received a mandate from the Member States. A first agreement was concluded in 2019, but it was never ratified. In principle, the adopted mandate cannot be modified during the discussions, recalled this week the Hungarian presidency of the Council of the European Union, which brings together the Twenty-seven at ministerial level.
Once the Commission considers that the negotiation with Mercosur is complete, it places a draft text on the Council table for agreement. The European Commission has two options. You can present your draft agreement as is or split it into two parts.
In it first caseIt will be necessary for this free trade agreement to be ratified by the 27 national Parliaments, because it contains elements of national competence, such as investment protection. In it second caseThe treaty is divided into two parts, including a strictly commercial one, the most important, because it details all the measures related to commercial exchanges between the two blocs, from industry to services, including agriculture.
This possibility, denounced by France, contrary according to it to the mandate given by the Twenty-seven to the Commission, allows the adoption of the text by the Council of the EU by qualified majority.
The Commission has not announced its decision, but it is likely that it will choose to split its text and therefore opt for a qualified majority to speed up the decision-making process, several diplomatic sources say.
For block the decisionA blocking minority is needed at the time of the Twenty-Seven vote. Voting by qualified majority establishes that a text is adopted if 55% of the Member States, or 15 countries representing at least 65% of the population, vote in favor. To avoid this adoption, it is necessary to bring together at least four countries. But that is not enough. They must be countries with enough population to prevent supporters of the agreement from reaching 65% of the EU population.
There France must therefore bring together three other countries. which cannot just be Malta, Cyprus or Luxembourg. Poland and Austria have expressed their opposition in the past, but the pressure from the defenders, Germany and Spain in the lead, is very strong.
the treatydivided or not, must be ratified by the European Parliament. In this forum, France has another chance to block the agreement, since MEPs are very divided. The overwhelming majority of French MEPs, all political tendencies together, are against it. They can count on a large number of colleagues from the radical left and environmentalists, but things are not so clear in the center, the right and the extreme right.
