PARIS: A day after the EU and US struck a trade deal Sunday, the French govt 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," PM Francois Bayrou wrote on X about the deal, which imposes 15% tariffs on European imports to the US, but lowers barriers in European countries for American imports.
France had been leading a charge in Europe to retaliate against the US before the deal, after an earlier threat by Trump to impose a punishing 30% tariff on the Europeans.
Benjamin Haddad, France's minister in charge of European affairs, suggested that Trump's trade deal amounted to a predatory tactic and called for Europe to activate an anti-coercion instrument to tax US digital services, or to exclude US tech companies from public contracts in Europe.
Despite France's push on other European countries to take a harder line, a majority of European countries had wanted a deal quickly.
"I'm 100% sure that this deal is better than a trade war with the US," top EU trade negotiator Maros Sefcovic told journalists. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and the Italian PM, Giorgia Meloni, too welcomed the deal. "The agreement has succeeded in averting a trade conflict that would have hit the export-oriented German economy hard," Merz said in a statement late on Sunday. "This has enabled us to safeguard our core interests..."
"I consider it positive that there is an agreement...," Meloni told journalists on the sidelines of a meeting in Addis Ababa on Sunday.
Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, an ally Trump, too blasted the agreement. calling it a failure on the part of Europe's leadership. Orban said. "Trump ate (European Commission president) Ursula von der Leyen for breakfast, that's what happened."