European Commissioner for Trade Maroš Šefčovič , who has been involved in months-long negotiations with the United States on tariffs, considers the new agreement “the best possible under very difficult circumstances”. The official said this at a briefing in Brussels on 28 July.
Šefčovič spoke about the talks between US President Donald Trump and European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, who, according to the European commissioner, “has been absolutely superb in managing these negotiations”.
“If you were in the room yesterday (where the negotiations continued – ed.) you would have seen that the starting point was 30 per cent tariffs. It was an absolutely real prospect that from 1 August all our exports would have been subject to 30 per cent tariffs,” the European Commissioner stressed.
According to Šefčovič, this would have led to an all-out trade war with “unbearable” consequences.
“Tariffs exceeding 30 per cent, then huge political tensions, many small and medium-sized enterprises experiencing a dramatic decline. And the potential loss of hundreds of thousands if not millions of jobs. What happens afterwards? The situation will become so unbearable that we will have to reach a negotiated solution. We will have to sit down and negotiate a new agreement, but under much worse conditions,” Šefčovič explained.
The new agreement, the European Commissioner continued, saves trade flows between the world’s two largest economies and “opens a new division in EU-US relations.” Šefčovič also spoke about the added geopolitical value of the new agreement.
“It’s about security, Ukraine, the current geopolitical instability. I cannot go into all the details of what was discussed yesterday, but I can assure you that it was not only about trade. Therefore, I mean the possibility that the two largest economies and two closest allies can openly discuss all sensitive issues,” the official stressed.
Commenting on the remark about the unbalanced nature of the new agreement, under which imports from the EU would be subject to 15 per cent tariffs in the US, instead the Americans would export their goods to Europe with almost no restrictions, the European commissioner said that member states were involved “at every step” of the negotiation process.
“We certainly explained to them the complexity of the situation. And if some people still think that we can go back to the situation before 2 April (on that day the US imposed a 10% basic tariff on almost all imports from the EU – ed.)… then it is quite clear that the peace that we had before 2 April has disappeared,” the European Commissioner said.
On 27 July, the EU and the US, following direct talks between President Donald Trump and European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen, concluded a trade agreement, which, according to the US President’s assessment, is the largest in scale among all those already concluded by the United States.
The US import duty for the EU will be 15 per cent (the same as the EU duty for the US), rather than 30 per cent, as it would have been if no agreement had been reached.
Trump also said that the EU will buy $750 billion worth of energy resources from the US, and this will solve “a lot of problems for Europe.” The EU will also invest an additional $600bn in the US economy and buy hundreds of billions of dollars worth of US military equipment.
Von der Leyen, later describing Trump as a tough negotiator, said the agreement reached was “the best we could get”.
The agreement was praised by Germany, whose economy is the largest in the EU. Chancellor Friedrich Merz is pleased that a trade war has been averted.
But the agreement was sharply criticised by France, which is among Europe’s biggest exporters. Its prime minister, François Bayrou, faulted the EU for making excessive concessions to the US side.
“It is a black day when an alliance of free peoples, united by their values and the defence of their interests, resigns itself to subjugation,” Bayrou stressed.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgio Maloni sees the fact that the deal has been concluded as positive, but wants to see more details.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban also believes that the EU has “caved in” to US demands in trade negotiations.
“It does not look like President Trump’s conclusion of an agreement with Ursula von der Leyen, but that Donald Trump ate von der Leyen for breakfast,” the Hungarian prime minister emphasised.