‘Nobody puts faith’ in the EU-Mercosur pact, with or without ‘Lula show’ – 07/16/2023 – Nelson de Sá

Western agencies do not expect much from the summit of South Americans and Europeans in Brussels, this Monday and Tuesday, whose focus is the European Union-Mercosur trade agreement. AFP, Efe and Reuters point out that there should be “little progress”, as it causes “fear among farmers in Europe” and “no one puts much faith in it”.

Without the Mexican AMLO, “it’s going to be another Lula show”, ironized a specialist from the University of New York interviewed by Efe. The president of Brazil, who took over Mercosur, was reluctant, but ended up traveling to try to advance the agreement.

The Financial Times wrote an editorial criticizing the EU for “the delay in rediscovering Latin America, a crucial region for the energy transition”. And for having, after 20 years of negotiation, demanded “additional environmental safeguards, which in Latin American eyes are poorly disguised agricultural protectionism”.

In a report, the newspaper adds that “Brussels hopes to regain ground lost to China”, recalling that in these “two decades the EU has gone from being Brazil’s largest trading partner to third”. But he reiterates that “the key agreement with Mercosur remains stalled and few expect progress”.

He underscores the questioning of environmental sanctions raised by special advisor Celso Amorim at the Chatham House organization, saying that the European addendum “is not in good faith and was presented in a totally inappropriate way”.

In an extensive interview with the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, the president of FGV, Carlos Ivan Simonsen Leal, goes further in his criticism. In the title, between quotation marks, a declaration: “We are not schoolboys who allow themselves to be sanctioned by the colonial powers” (reproduction above).

Other highlighted passages: “the problem is that something has been agreed, something has been signed, and now new rules are being proposed”; “you don’t see us as part of the western world”; “Europe is being cannibalized” by the US, starting from the war.

‘AN AMERICAN LOBIST’

The summit takes place amid a revolt within the EU itself, over an appointment to the bloc’s Directorate-General for Competition. In the title of the French Le Monde (above), “Nomination of Fiona Scott Morton, American lobbyist, to a high post in the European Commission is controversial in Brussels”.

A letter from the leaders of the main political groups in the European Parliament, from a German on the center-right to a Spaniard on the center-left, demanded to review the choice. Morton, according to Politico and FT, was a consultant for Apple, Amazon and Meta, among other American big techs, and served in the American government.

She is taking the reins, critics ask, “as Europe embarks on the world’s most ambitious digital regulation”.

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