The European Parliament voted on Tuesday to adopt the EU-US deal struck last summer by US President Donald Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Turnberry, Scotland.
The final greenlight needed to implement the agreement comes as Trump threatened on Monday to impose tariffs on French wine and champagne if Paris did not remove its digital tax on US Big Tech.
However, Trump’s latest threats of a trade war with EU countries did not prevent lawmakers from approving the deal. Four hundred and fortyMEPs voted in favour, 151 against, and 50 abstained in the vote on the main legislative act aimed at changing the trade terms.
The vote allows the EU to remove its duties on most US industrial goods, as agreed in the Turnberry deal, while Europeans commit to paying 15 percent US tariffs on goods exported to the United States.
Some lawmakers have consistently criticised the deal as imbalanced, but the Commission, which negotiated it on behalf of the EU, said it was the best agreement it could secure from the Americans.
“We said, and we still believe, this is not what it should be,” Belgian MEP Kathleen Van Brempt told reporters before the vote on behalf of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group, adding that the Commission would not have concluded such a deal if it had not been for security considerations, namely maintaining US support for Ukraine.
Instead, the EU executive pushed for a swift implementation of the agreement, as the US threatened not to implement its side of the deal if the EU failed to do so.
But lawmakers took their time, freezing the process earlier this year after Trump threatened to impose tariffs on EU countries that would not allow him to acquire Greenland.
Since then, Trump has shown that he is willing to use tariffs as a coercive tool against European partners on issues unrelated to trade, as he did when he threatened to impose 25 percent tariff on EU cars after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz criticised the war in Iran.
That is why EU lawmakers sought to introduce safeguards into the agreement to shield it from future pressure from the US administration.
“We have a strong suspension clause, so that if the US breaches the deal, we come back to our tariff system,” German MEP Bernd Lange (S&D) said.
Negotiations between MEPs and EU countries were tough in May, with the Parliament sacrificing some of its demands to get the deal done.
A “sunset clause” was introduced into the final agreement to end the trade deal on 31 March 2029 – at which point Trump’s term will be over – unless it is renewed.
MEPs also secured a provision allowing the Commission to suspend the trade agreement at the request of either Parliament or a member state if the US fails to lift tariffs on European steel and aluminium by the end of 2026.
But the recent threats of tariffs by the US administration over forced labour, as well as the latest warnings by Trump over wine and champagne, are evidence that the tariff saga is not yet over.