On January 9th, the European Council authorised the signing of the agreement with Mercosur, the customs union comprising Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. The decision by the 27 member States, taken by majority vote, overrode strong opposition from France, with Poland, Austria, Hungary, and Ireland also voting against and Belgium abstaining.
Ratification by the European Parliament is still pending, as it has requested a legal opinion from the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, but both the Council and the Commission seem inclined to apply the agreement provisionally, as urged by the German and Italian governments. Meanwhile, on January 17th, Presidents Antônio Costa and Ursula von der Leyen flew to South America to seal the deal, moving to close a 30-year political battle.
False breakthroughs and ultimatums
The EU’s strategic interest in Mercosur was already evident in the mid-1990s. Negotiations began in 1999 and dragged on for decades, with drawn-out behind-the-scene talks and repeated European attempts to reach agreement, frustrated time and again, as were the periodic now or never
threats from Latin American governments.
Jean-Claude Juncker, then president of the Brussels Commission, celebrated a first political agreement in 2019, joined on the G20 podium by key leaders: France’s Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and Argentina’s Mauricio Macri. It seemed like a done deal, but European ratification ran aground on French opposition, which was justified by the insufficient environmental commitments of its South American partners, at a time marked by the Paris climate agreement and major investments in the green transition.
The subsequent Commission, led by von der Leyen, included stronger environmental obligations in the negotiations and made several attempts to reach an agreement. Despite growing pressure from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the Élysée Palace’s veto prevailed each time, motivated by the need to defend French farmers.
In December 2024, shortly after taking office for her second term, von der Leyen elected to challenge Macron’s declared opposition, flying to the Uruguayan capital Montevideo to proclaim for the second time, five years after Juncker, the completion of negotiations with Mercosur.
A decisive four-month period
Following the Commission’s coup de force, French resistance once again appeared to be blocking the European ratification process at the beginning of 2025. Global attention was absorbed by Donald Trump’s return to the White House and his tariff war. The bitter compromise reached at Turnberry between von der Leyen and Trump in July laid bare the Atlantic crisis. The European response began to develop along two tracks: rearmament, and free trade negotiations in every direction. In September, the Commission asked European governments to ratify the Mercosur agreement, with the aim of signing it in Brazil in December. In October, Brussels proposed new safeguards for the most sensitive agricultural sectors. In November, the European Council approved these measures: Macron declared himself satisfied, yet the French Parliament remained totally opposed.
In December, events accelerated: on the 14th, the Élysée Palace requested a postponement of the signing; on the 16th, the European Parliament approved the new safeguards, strengthening them with even more sensitive intervention thresholds; on the 18th, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni sided with Macron in postponing the agreement, albeit by only a few weeks. Finally, in January, thanks to an increase in European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) funds, the Council gave its approval, leaving France in the minority.
This dynamic of long delays and sudden accelerations reflects a complex series of political battles in Europe, both with the Mercosur countries and, above all, within the Union itself. Today, as in 2019, the EU’s momentum originates in Trump’s offensive, which is destroying the relative certainties of the multilateral order and the Atlantic Alliance.
Americas first
European choices are intertwined with the latest destabilising moves by the White House and cannot help but be influenced by them: on December 4th came the shock of the new US National Security Strategy (NSS), which revives the hemispheric logic of the Monroe Doctrine and is clearly hostile towards Europe; on January 3rd followed the blitz to dethrone Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, followed by sensational threats against Greenland.
Over the years, in these pages, we have questioned the apparent indifference of US political discourse towards European initiatives in the Southern Cone, US imperialism’s natural sphere of influence. This silence is all the more incongruous considering that the EU’s political target towards Mercosur in the 1990s was born explicitly in response to Washington’s initiative to create the FTAA, a free trade area across the entire American continent, which was supported by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In 2017, we wrote that Trump might become the interpreter of that continental strategy, albeit in his contradictory way, perhaps as an extension of the
. Today, that hypothesis has become a concrete reality. However, thus far, there have been no significant objections from the White House to the EU-Mercosur agreement. Perhaps the US can accept coexistence with the EU in Latin America, in the name of the common and higher need to counter China’s overwhelming advance?America First
slogan to the entire Western hemisphere
European success?
In following the European struggle over Mercosur, despite the repeated missed deadlines of recent years, we have always considered it likely that the operation would ultimately succeed. This was suggested by political logic, accentuated by the lack of alternative cards in Brussels’ hand, more than the modest economic advantages of the gradual elimination of tariffs. On the other hand, we never ruled out the possibility that the project could fail, considering, for example, that the United States, despite its greater degree of federal centralisation, was unable to achieve consensus to rejoin the important Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, equally strategic in the confrontation with China.
If it overcomes the hurdle of the European Parliament, the EU will have achieved an important political result, not merely symbolic. Furthermore, it will have set a new precedent of institutional pragmatism, helping to define the concrete forms of European political centralisation. Indeed, Brussels proposed two agreements with Mercosur to the European Council: a provisional trade agreement, subject to the Commission’s federal authority in matters of foreign trade, and a definitive general agreement, which will incorporate the former when, and if, it is ever approved by all member States. The trade agreement required ratification by the Council of the Twenty-Seven by a qualified majority: at least fifteen countries representing at least 65% of the European population. The 21 governments that voted yes represent 68.7% of European citizens, just over the required threshold. Italy, with 13.1%, was decisive, but the same was true of Spain (10.9%), the Netherlands (4%), Romania (4.2%), and, of course, Germany (18.6%).
Macron the strategist
Journalistic commentary has emphasised, on the one hand, the EU’s ability to reach a decision by a majority vote, without being paralysed by isolated vetoes; but there are also those who condemn its inability to reach full European consensus after decades of negotiations.
One obvious political aspect is the disagreement within the Franco-German axis, a worrying crack in the Union’s foundation. It should be noted, however, that the divergence is entirely superstructural. In France, there is broad economic consensus in favour of the agreement with Mercosur; opposition is limited to cattle farmers and a few other agricultural sectors. Yet the French Parliament and political parties express unanimous political rejection
, in the words of Macron, who ultimately resigned himself to representing this imbalance. Moreover, the Élysée claims to have obtained, through its pressure, increased CAP aid, and additional agricultural guarantees, making France’s rejection of the agreement particularly paradoxical and allowing the Italian government to take much of the credit for the final compromise.
The Frenchman Pascal Lamy, former European Commissioner for Trade, advised von der Leyen to move forward on Mercosur, leaving Paris in the minority. According to Lamy, Macron was making a serious mistake by prioritising short-term political calculations — the upcoming elections and the fragile balance of French governments — over a strategic objective of the Union. We hypothesised that the Élysée Palace considered it equally crucial for European imperialism to stem the rise of Marine Le Pen’s Euro-sceptic sovereignism in Paris, the political heart of the continent. This consideration remains valid. Time will tell how effective Macron’s choices will be for France, but today his ambition as leader of Europe appears to have been severely curtailed.
Another world
The EU conceived the strategic project with Mercosur in the 1990s and is now set to implement it in a profoundly transformed world. To the constant long-term transformations produced by uneven economic development between States and continents are added the seismic shocks of today’s crisis of the world order, which are becoming increasingly frequent. In 2019, we could still interpret the announcement of the EU-Mercosur political agreement as an indication of the predominantly libarist character of the global cycle
. Even then, the initiative had a dual nature: it reaffirmed a line of openness and international cooperation, a form of possible multilateralism in the face of the stalemate of the more universalist demands mediated through the WTO; at the same time, it was a potential weapon in the global war for the partition of markets and raw materials, explicitly intended to counter China’s spread. Today, the second aspect is becoming more pronounced.
Brussels is determined to exploit the strong relationship between Europe and South America, separated by the Atlantic Ocean but united by centuries of capital investment, immigration, and linguistic identity. This is a European strength that could also be useful to Washington, faced with the epochal challenge posed by Beijing. Rana Foroohar, a US columnist for the Financial Times and a sympathiser with certain America First demands, writes that China and its allies are already in America’s backyard and, to keep it safe, the US will have to work with and support its allies
.
These are the elements of a potential Atlantic compromise over Latin America, but any prediction must include the high uncertainty of the Trump factor. Although temporarily attenuated, threats of anti-European tariffs and claims on Greenland have hinted at the potential for a qualitative leap in the Atlantic crisis.