French Senate rejected EU- Canada free trade agreement
The European Union’s {EU} free trade agreement was rejected by French Senate, when 211 voted against and 44 for it.
Communist Party deputies wanted to schedule the debate for free trade agreement in National Assembly for May 30, only ten days before the EU elections, but Macron’s government will delay this. It is necessary to prevent its opponents from using the trade agreement with Canada to conduct political maneuvers during the European campaign, as stated by Minister Riester.
https://twitter.com/franckriester/status/1770881408786956325
The EU-Canada free trade deal has triggered an unusual alliance of Macron’s opponents on both the Left and Right: the Communist Party and the centre-right Les Républicains. It is an “unnatural alliance”, says Riester.
Emmanuel Macron is also keen to postpone consideration of the free trade agreement given farmers’ opposition to the agreement. Free trade agreements are receiving harsher scrutiny amid the EU-wide farmer protests, notes Oxford Analytica.
Free-trade deals, a symbol of the EU’s will to open up markets and boost competition, have become the target of fierce criticism across the political spectrum since Europe -wide farmer protests highlighted what they called unfair competition from abroad.
French farmers, who have pressured the government to obtain more aid, were spearheading the fight against international free-trade deals and CETA in particular. The critics pointing to Canada’s laxer approach to genetically-modified organisms, hormones, pesticides and herbicides, and lower standards on animal welfare compared to the EU.
Latest poll in a March 2024 showed, that more than 55 percent of French people opposed the treaty, said Pierre Jacquel, an economic researcher at the Paris University at the Sorbonne.
The Canada- EU trade agreement “is bad for the farmers of France and Europe. It only benefits the biggest agribusinesses,’ said MEP Marie Toussaint from French Green Party.
https://twitter.com/marietouss1/status/1772902232297545917
The rejection by the Senate means the bill needs to go back to France’s lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, where lawmakers had narrowly backed CETA in a 2019 vote. Since then, President Emmanuel Macron – an advocate of free trade policies – has lost his absolute majority in the chamber.
Rejection of the trade commented Richard Ouellet, a specialist in economic globalization issues at Laval University in Quebec City. “I’ve heard falsehoods, exaggerations, distortions and caricatures,” he raged, “this massive rejection [by senators] is an insult to Canada and to the truth.”
CETA is Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and EU. Was ratified by the 17 EU parliament, but ten countries showed the red, for now. Until more globalist lobbyists spend more millions of pocket money on corruption to reach the goal: destroy the small and middle size agricultural businesses worldwide and put all food production under few international megalomanias’ corporations running by the globalists.
DB
