German Chancellor Friedrich Merz hailed the EU’s looming trade deal with South America’s Mercosur bloc on Sunday as he opened a major trade fair in Hanover and welcomed Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as a guest of honour.
Merz described Brazil the largest of the Mercosur countries as a valuable economic and strategic partner for the European Union in a world riven by conflict.
Lula joined Merz in casting the deal as a response to tariffs and other trade protectionism, an indirect criticism of US President Donald Trump.
“Faced with unilateralism, Mercosur and the European Union have chosen cooperation,” Lula said at the Hanover international trade fair’s opening event.
The Brazilian president later added: “We cannot allow the world to bow to the behaviour of a president who thinks that by e-mail or by Twitter he can tax products, punish countries and wage war.”
The EU-Mercosur trade deal is set to take provisional effect on May 1, though the agreement still faces a legal challenge from European lawmakers.
Lula noted the deal will create “a market of almost 720 million people and a GDP of $23 trillion”.
Merz said the Hanover industrial trade fair which attracts more than 3,000 companies is an opportunity to demonstrate the “trust” that exists between Europe and South America, based on “cooperation with as few tariffs as possible, and if possible, none at all”.
The pact with Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay which has been in the works for more than 25 years has faced fierce opposition in Europe from farmers’ groups backed by France and some others.
But Germany has long championed the deal, with hopes of finding new export markets to revive a struggling industrial economy.
Merz on Sunday contended that the deal would “make all the economies involved stronger, more independent and more resilient”.
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