France will oppose the Mercosur treaty right until the end

Instead, the country’s farmers have been demonstrating, sometimes violently, against a treaty that has crystallized their long-standing anger with European rules on food, environmental safety and animal welfare. They object, in particular, to the abolition or reduction of tariffs on 160,000 metric tons of Mercosur beef, which they say is produced by methods banned in the EU, such as the use of artificial growth hormones.

Brussels, for its part, notes that the treaty specifically excludes hormone-enhanced beef, and that the annual beef quota for Mercosur is a small fraction of the EU market and less than Europe currently imports. However, both French farmers and the French government believe there are insufficient guarantees that Mercosur farmers will respect the bloc’s import rules, and they’re demanding “mirror clauses” that would effectively impose European standards on all South American meat production — a non-starter for the Latin Americans.

Crucially, though, the political significance of this dispute has now snowballed, as French media and opposition parties have presented the possibility of the Commission ignoring French objections and other EU members outvoting the country as a sign of Paris’ waning influence.

Back in September, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s insistence on the removal of France’s then Commissioner Thierry Breton was already seen as a slight against the EU’s second biggest member. And now, the country’s failing campaign against the Mercosur deal is being viewed by national media as a partial consequence of France’s failure to meet its commitments to reduce its budget deficit, adding to the unfolding domestic crisis.

Meanwhile, other European governments — especially Germany — have been exasperated by France’s position, and fail to understand why one of the world’s biggest food exporters would allow policy to be dictated by a minority of its farmers.

And while Macron and Barnier have attempted to wield a kind of moral-historical “veto,” saying they “cannot imagine” the Commission going ahead with such a controversial treaty against the wishes of a large founding member, the word from Brussels is that the Commission hopes to do exactly that before the Mercosur summit this week.