(Paris) The French Senate voted Thursday against the free trade treaty between the European Union and Canada, better known by its English acronym CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement), thanks to a convenient alliance of left-right oppositions, jeopardizing the ratification of this agreement against a backdrop of agricultural crisis, a major shock for the French government.
In an extremely tense climate, senators rejected by 211 votes to 44 the article of the bill relating to this treaty, applied provisionally since 2017, but never submitted to the upper house. They then confirmed this rejection with a final vote.
The blow was struck at the initiative of the communist group with the support of the right, the treaty, signed in 2016 and adopted in 2017 at European level, being much criticized in France, in a climate marked by the agricultural crisis and tense around European issues before the European elections in June.
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It is “a political thunderclap”, a “democratic victory”, savored the communist senator Fabien Gay.
The French Minister for Foreign Trade, Franck Riester, denounced “a crude maneuver, an unacceptable manipulation with serious consequences for our country” and “a disastrous signal” for Canada.
It is simply a political move that the communists, the socialists, with the support of the Republicans, are carrying out in the middle of the European election campaign to the detriment of the general interest.
Franck Riester, French Minister for Foreign Trade
“We will continue to work on ratifying the agreement with our partners in the European Union (EU) in order to advance our common strategic interests,” responded the Canadian government.
Return to the Assembly?
This rejection by the Senate is not enough in itself to denounce the agreement on a European scale, but the setbacks of the French government on this sensitive subject are far from over.
The communist deputies announced that they would include this text in their parliamentary time reserved for the National Assembly on May 30, ten days before the European elections.
The deputies had narrowly approved the ratification of CETA in 2019, but the presidential camp lost the absolute majority, which augurs a possible rejection of the text.
In this hypothesis, the equation would then become very complex: either the government notifies Brussels that it cannot ratify the treaty and this leads to the end of its provisional application for all of Europe; or he procrastinates at the risk of attracting the wrath of oppositions who will cry out for democratic denial.
Currently, ten member states have not completed the ratification process and only one has rejected it: Cyprus. But Nicosia never notified this rejection, which allows the agreement to continue to apply.
Another hypothesis circulates among parliamentarians: the executive having the hand to transmit a bill from one chamber to the other, it could not transmit the text to the National Assembly, which would de facto prevent its registration in the agenda on May 30.
Reactions from the antipodes
The government has in all cases gone out of its way to try to convince of the merits of this agreement which removes most of the customs duties between the EU and Canada, citing the increase in exports and the benefits for the sectors. wine or dairy.
In a column published by the economic daily The echoesseveral employers’ organizations, including the most important, the MEDEF, had also praised the “convincing results” of the treaty in seven years of provisional application, emphasizing the figures for French exports to Canada, which jumped by 33% between 2017. and 2023.
But the discontent of the agricultural world seemed more convincing in the eyes of the senatorial right, who overwhelmingly voted against the text.
The president of the National Bovine Federation (FNB), Patrick Bénézit, welcomed the rejection as “good news”. The senators made “the right choice” by rejecting “a treaty which authorizes foodstuffs which do not respect our production conditions”, he told AFP.
Register opposed to the Federation of Wine and Spirits Exporters (FEVS), the agri-food sector which has benefited the most from CETA.
The vote of the senators “will deal a bad blow to the entire wine and spirits sector”, declared to AFP the general delegate of the FEVS, Nicolas Ozanam.
“In an economically complicated moment [pour les exportations de la filière]put yourself in a delicate position after a good dynamic [depuis la mise en œuvre du traité] seems totally surreal to us,” he regretted.