A day after the European Union and United States struck a trade deal on Sunday, the French government has come out swinging against the agreement, calling instead for tariff retaliation and warning that Europe would be politically weakened if it didn’t hit back.
“It is a dark day when an alliance of free peoples, gathered to affirm their values and defend their interests, resolves to submit,” Prime Minister François Bayrou wrote on X about the deal, which imposes 15 percent tariffs on European imports to the United States, but lowers barriers in European countries for American imports.
France had been leading a charge in Europe to retaliate against the United States ahead of the deal, after an earlier threat by Mr. Trump to impose a punishing 30 percent tariff on the Europeans. Mr. Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff threats had galvanized President Emmanuel Macron in particular, who said the European Union had no choice but to present a show of force.
Mr. Macron has yet to comment on the trade deal, but the sharpened attacks by a phalanx of his closest cabinet members were in line with his increasingly confrontational position toward Mr. Trump on key trans-Atlantic issues. Last week, Mr. Macron said his government would recognize a Palestinian state, setting France apart from the United States and most of its close allies, and risking friction with Mr. Trump.
With the outlines of a trade deal now clearer, Mr. Macron’s government has doubled down. Benjamin Haddad, France’s minister in charge of European affairs, suggested that Mr. Trump’s trade deal amounted to a predatory tactic and called for Europe to activate an anti-coercion instrument to tax U.S. digital services, or to exclude American tech companies from public contracts in Europe.
“The free trade that has brought shared prosperity to both sides of the Atlantic since the end of the Second World War is now being rejected by the United States, which has opted for economic coercion and complete disregard for W.T.O. rules,” Mr. Haddad wrote on Monday. “We must quickly draw the necessary conclusions or risk being wiped out.”
Mr. Trump and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, focused on the scale of the trade deal on Sunday when they met at Mr. Trump’s golf course in Scotland. The two sides have the biggest economic relationship in the world, trading nearly $2 trillion in goods and services annually.
Despite France’s push on other European countries to take a harder line, a majority of European countries had wanted a deal quickly. Ms. Von der Leyen “simply took into account the wishes of the majority of member states who do not want a confrontation with the United States,” Gérard Araud, France’s former ambassador to the United States, wrote on X.
A 15 percent tariff on E.U. goods is a notable increase, when just a few weeks ago, Europe was working on negotiating a 10 percent across-the-board rate. Many European companies will also be worse off under the recent deal than before, when U.S. import tariffs were in the low single digits.
While the deal gives notable relief to Europe’s hulking car industry — in particular German automakers including Audi and BMW, which had been facing separate 25 percent tariffs — it also puts other European industries in a bind.
France, in particular, did not get what it had been pushing for in several areas. Major industries got exemptions from the tariffs, including airplanes, which will benefit the European aerospace giant Airbus, based in Toulouse, France, along with its American rival, Boeing.
But many companies that are symbolic of “Made in France” and do big business with the United States will now find their products more expensive to export there, including the wine and spirits industries. French cognac, wine and Champagne make up nearly half of all Europe’s drinks exports to America.
Also at risk are French cosmetics products, which previously had zero customs duties to enter the United States but will now be taxed at 15 percent, said Emmanuel Guichard, secretary general of the Federation of Beauty Companies, which includes L’Oreal, the maker of Garnier hair and skin care, and LVMH, which owns Sephora as well as high-end beauty brands including Christian Dior perfumes. That shift also poses “a significant threat” to the French industry that could put up to 5,000 jobs at risk, he said.
And as Mr. Trump headed out to his golf resort in western Scotland on Monday with the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, the uneven nature of America’s trade deals with Europe and Britain were in stark relief.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Starmer hammered out an earlier deal for Britain to pay an across-the-board tariff of 10 percent on its exports to America, including British-made cars. European companies were eager not to be taxed at the 30 percent rate that Mr. Trump had threatened, but they are still worried that 15 percent duties would make their exports more expensive in America than British goods.
“This agreement should not be the end of the story,” France’s minister for foreign trade, Laurent Saint-Martin, said Monday. If it is, “we would simply have weakened ourselves.”
Liz Alderman is the chief European business correspondent, writing about economic, social and policy developments around Europe.
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