The European Union will forge ahead with putting in place a major trade deal with four South American countries, officials said on Friday, even after lawmakers began a legal challenge that could have delayed the agreement for years.
Last month, lawmakers in the European Parliament referred the deal, which is set to create one of the largest free-trade zones in the world, with more than 700 million people, to the European Court of Justice. That had the potential to delay the deal up to two years.
But on Friday, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said that the deal with Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, together known as Mercosur, would be “provisionally applied.”
She described the deal as “one of the most consequential trade agreements of the first half of this century.”
European Union officials have pushed to diversify trading relationships amid upheaval with the bloc’s biggest trading partners, the United States and China. This week, the European Parliament paused the approval process for the European Union’s trade deal with the United States, after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated many of President Trump’s tariffs. At the same time, Europe is contending with a large increase in imports from China, leading to increasingly imbalanced trade.
Last month, the European Union signed a trade deal with India after nearly two decades of negotiations. The Mercosur pact was also agreed to after years of contention, with farmers staging major protests in some European cities in recent months.
Olof Gill, a spokesman for the European Commission, cited “geostrategic urgency” as the reason for the move, saying any further delay would risk weakening the bloc’s economic position and political influence. “If we wait, others may overtake us,” he said. “We cannot allow that to happen in the current geopolitical context.”
Uruguay and Argentina were the first to ratify the deal on Thursday, and so the European Union would now “proceed with provisional application,” Ms. von der Leyen said. Brazil and Paraguay were expected to follow soon, she added.
Provisionally applying the agreement would give the bloc “first-mover advantage in a world of sharp competition and short horizons,” Ms. von der Leyen said.
Carrying out the deal still has to follow a few steps: The commission will first exchange formal notifications with the countries that have ratified the deal, then agreement will enter into provisional application a month later at the earliest.
Ms. von der Leyen said that she had reached out to heads of European member states and other lawmakers before moving to apply the deal provisionally, and that the Parliament would still have to give its consent before the trade deal could be fully concluded.
The commission’s decision to move forward with the deal without waiting for the legal review has angered some members of the European Parliament, which voted by a slim margin to send the deal to a judicial review.
Jordan Bardella, president of the far-right National Rally party in France and a member of the European Parliament, called the move an “antidemocratic power grab” in a social media post on Friday.
Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting.
Koba Ryckewaert is a reporter and researcher for The Times based in Brussels.
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