“At the end of the month of September, when trade ministers meet in Bratislava.I will ask in France’s name for the end of negotiations on TTIP”, he said on RMC Radio. “We need a clear and definitive stop to these negotiations to start again on good bases”.
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German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, of Gabriel’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), urged diplomats and business chiefs on Tuesday to counter anti-globalization sentiments that are fuelling opposition to free trade deals.
Backers of a sweeping US-EU free trade deal see it bringing economic gains on both sides of the Atlantic.
France’s trade minister said the USA hasn’t offered anything substantial and that talks on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership should end.
A spokesman for US Trade Representative Michael Froman told Der Spiegel on Tuesday that talks on TTIP were progressing. “The U.S. has balked at accepting minimum European Union standards in the talks and unless that stance changes, I can’t see that it’s possible to seal the accord”, he said.
“The negotiations are still not over”, said German government spokesman Steffen Seibert in Berlin on Merkel’s behalf.
Fekl said that TTIP talks were “obscure” and that that the USA “gives nothing or just crumbles”. Kern is due to hold a press conference on TTIP on Friday. Influential American labor leader Richard Trumka, president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations or AFL-CIO, has said the agreement, which aims at harmonizing safety, labor, manufacturing and other regulations across the world’s two largest economies, appears aimed at lowering standards, and not improving them.
As Brussels and Washington are struggling to conclude a landmark bilateral trade talks by the end of this year, recent intensified critique from European politicians, along with year-long protests, cast doubt and uncertainty over the deal’s future.
However, as European Commissioner for Trade Ignacio Garcia Bercero revealed following the 14th round in July 2016, no agreements have been reached on any of the 27 chapters addressed so far, despite “hundreds of meetings, hours spent on the phone, and many TTIP proposals exchanged, discussed, and exchanged again”.
Already in May, French President Francoise Hollande said he would “never accept” the deal in its current guise because of the rules it enforces on France and the rest of Europe.
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Britain’s June vote to leave the European Union has further clouded the picture, even though the Commission has a mandate to finalize TTIP talks on behalf of all European Union 28 members.
