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Brussels (ANSA) – In the evening Ursula von der Leyen informed EU leaders of a decision that had remained hanging in the balance until the last moment, accepting the requests of Italy and France: the postponement to January of the signing – initially scheduled for Saturday 20 December – of the EU-Mercosur agreement. Already in the afternoon Palazzo Chigi had frozen the deal, sealing an unprecedented convergence with Emmanuel Macron.
First, as the government reiterated, “the necessary answers for farmers” are needed, guarantees of reciprocity and time. A message that arrived while, inside the halls of the European Council, tension was already high over the dossier of frozen Russian assets. Outside, the concerns shared also by farmers from Belgium, Poland and Ireland took shape in the acrid smell of protests. They arrived in Brussels en masse: around 8,000 demonstrators, almost a thousand tractors, to protest also against cuts to the CAP in the next EU budget.
A siege that clashed with the urgency pushed by the European Commission, together with Berlin and Madrid, to conclude – after 26 years of negotiations – a partnership considered essential to diversify markets and respond to the tariffs of Donald Trump. “My surprise was discovering that Italy, together with France, did not want to sign the agreement,” admitted Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from the other side of the Atlantic, speaking also on behalf of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia.
However, a first attempt at dialogue came with a direct meeting with Meloni: the prime minister, the Brazilian leader reported, “is not against it, but she is under pressure from the agricultural world and asked me for patience: a week, ten days, at most a month.” The time needed – in Italy’s intentions – to cool down the streets and try to reopen the text by inserting stronger clauses.
But for Brussels – also under pressure from Macron, according to whom “the numbers don’t add up” – the safeguards are already on the table and have just received an initial green light from the European Parliament and from the national governments themselves. A position that von der Leyen, flanked by four commissioners, defended in a face-to-face meeting with the more open-to-dialogue component of the sector: the farmers gathered under the Copa-Cogeca banner – including representatives of Confagricoltura, Coldiretti who took to the streets a few blocks from the European quarter.
The prospect that, as planned, the president of the Commission would board the plane to Foz do Iguacu on Saturday has, however, gradually faded, until it disappeared. In the awareness that postponement to January still represents the lesser evil: the subsequent window in fact exists and is the handover of the rotating presidency of Mercosur from Brazil to Paraguay on 20 January, leaving another month of leeway (18 December).