Further doubts on EU-US trade deal

PROSPECTS FOR the proposed EU-US trade deal have been cast into further doubt after French president Francois Hollande said an agreement would not be forged before Barack Obama leaves office in January, and a trade minister called for an end to talks.

“France prefers to look things in the face,” Mr Hollande said in a diplomatic speech.

“These discussions cannot result in an agreement by the end of the year. The negotiations have bogged down, the positions have not been respected, the imbalance is obvious.”

His comments come after Matthias Fekl, the French minister for foreign trade, tweeted that the country is calling for negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) to cease.

Mr Fekl told RMC radio that “we need a clear, clean, definitive stop” to the negotiations, adding that talks could resume if wider EU-US trade relations improved.

Accusing the US side of offering “just crumbs”, Mr Fekl said France would ask the European Commission to halt the talks at a trade ministers meeting in Slovakia next month.

German economy minister Sigmar Gabriel said that the current round of talks with the US have “de facto failed, even though nobody is really admitting it”.

His views were in marked contrast to public comments by German chancellor Angela Merkel, who said last month the proposed US-EU deal was “absolutely in Europe’s interest”.

But Mr Gabriel, who is the head of Germany’s centre-left Social Democratic Party which is in coalition with Ms Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union, said: “We mustn’t submit to the American proposals.”