PARIS — France doesn’t yet want to conjure the ghost of a dead transatlantic free trade agreement.
An official from French President Emmanuel Macron’s office told POLITICO on Sunday that Paris is not pushing in the short term for a new TTIP-like pact between the European Union and the United States during trade negotiations between Brussels and Washington.
French Economy and Finance Minister Éric Lombard on Friday said Europe and the U.S. should seek “a genuine free-trade agreement” — but as a long-term goal.
“Before aiming for a free trade deal with the U.S., our first demand is that they withdraw their tariffs,” said an Elysée official, who was granted anonymity as is customary in France.
The official added that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is not interested in long-term proposals as it seeks deals during a 90-day pause on major tariffs it slapped on global trading partners earlier this month.
Lombard’s comments came as a surprise, especially as France played a key role in killing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) — a proposed trade deal that was negotiated between 2013 and 2016 but was never agreed upon.
An official from the French Ministry of Economy on Sunday said the minister was not trying to resurrect that deal but only remove tariffs on industrial goods, an option Brussels has already proposed. The official stressed that a possible agreement should not cover agricultural products.
Both current German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his incoming successor Friedrich Merz have backed the idea of a new EU-U.S. trade deal, although support across Europe for doing so appears tepid at best.
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