Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a close ally of Trump, said the US president “ate von der Leyen for breakfast”.<\/p>\n
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said he would support it “without any enthusiasm”.<\/p>\n
There was some relief in Europe that a deal had been done.<\/p>\n
Finland’s prime minister said it would provide “much-needed predictability”, while Irish Trade Minister Simon Harris said it brought the certainty “essential for jobs, growth and investment”.<\/p>\n
Defending its terms at a press conference on Monday, the EU’s trade commissioner Maros Sefcovic said it was the “best deal we could get under very difficult circumstances”.<\/p>\n
He also pointed to the security implications of maintaining cordial trade relations with the US in the context of the Ukraine war.<\/p>\n
Ensuring that Europe and the US were “aligned on the geopolitical issues of today”, he said, came with “an additional price”.<\/p>\n
In the weeks building up the final EU-US talks there had been a growing appetite among some European leaders to ramp up the pressure on Trump by using so-called anti-coercion measures, which would have blocked US firms access to European markets.<\/p>\n
But with 30% tariffs looming, the EU struck a deal on behalf of its members – one which will still inflict an economic blow, but a less severe one that had been feared when Trump originally threatened import taxes.<\/p>\n
Von der Leyen had sought to present it as a success on Sunday – but by Monday, even the leader of her European People’s Party, Manfred Weber, described it as “damage control”.<\/p>\n
While the broad outline of the deal has been agreed, its details will be finalised after technical talks.<\/p>\n
Initial business reaction across the Atlantic was similarly short of enthusiasm. The National Foreign Trade Council, based in Washington DC, said that any deal that avoided a trade war was “welcome progress”.<\/p>\n
However, it warned that any “short term gains” from a 15% tariff could eventually leave the US “isolated from a major ally and erode trust long term”.<\/p>\n
The previous tariff-free regime, it said, had allowed industries including aerospace and pharma to thrive “on both sides”.<\/p>\n
The initial deal framework “leaves in place a number of troubling EU policies”, it said, including what it called a “discriminatory digital agenda” and “unfair pharmaceutical reimbursement policies”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a close ally of Trump, said the US president “ate von der Leyen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302444,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[2000,299,36],"class_list":{"0":"post-302443","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-france"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114939132979427564","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}