France’s trade minister said on Tuesday that Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations should not continue.
Matthias Fekl said that his government will seek to bring talks to a halt. The deal is currently being hammered out by European Union and US officials.
“France is asking for an end to TTIP negotiations,” he said on Twitter.
Fekl later explained in a radio interview that “there is no political support from France” for the talks.
“The Americans give nothing, or just crumbs,” he said, according to The Financial Times. “We need a clear and definitive stop to these negotiations to start again on good bases.”
While French president Francois Hollande did not subsequently say that TTIP was dead, he said it will need significant restructuring.
“These discussions cannot result in an agreement by the end of the year,” he said, according to the BBC. “The negotiations have bogged down, the positions have not been respected, the imbalance is obvious.”
The statements out of France came just days after Germany’s Vice Chancellor described TTIP as being in a tailspin.
“In my opinion, the negotiations with the United States have de facto failed, even though nobody is really admitting it,” Sigmar Gabriel said. “Nothing is moving.”
Gabriel’s remarks were sharply criticized by EU officials. The bloc’s chief trade negotiator, Ignacio Garcia Bercero, questioned the veracity of the claims, remarking: “Remember what Mark Twain said.” (Twain once famously quipped that “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.)
The European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, responded Monday by saying that it is “making steady progress in the ongoing TTIP negotiations.”
President Obama’s chief negotiator, US Trade Representative Michael Froman, had made the same claim on Sunday.
The blows to TTIP come just days after another multilateral trade deal supported heavily by the Obama administration suffered a significant setback.
Late last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will not be considered by the upper house this year, meaning President Obama will not have a chance to usher in the final approval of his signature commercial initiative. Neither major presidential candidate currently supports the TPP.
