CETA, a free trade treaty between the EU and Canada in provisional application since 2017, “could” continue to operate even if, after the Senate last week, the Assembly were to reject it, Valérie Hayer assured Monday , head of the Macronist list for the European elections.
France “has institutional processes on these issues”, explained the candidate on Franceinfo, also saying she was “convinced that this agreement is good for our farmers”. “It will be the government’s decision to see what position will be taken,” if the Assembly rejects it, she added. Could it be enforced even if both chambers vote against it? “He might,” she replied.
Formally, the treaty could in fact continue to apply as long as the government has not notified Brussels that it cannot ratify the treaty. A coalition of senators from the right and the left, at the initiative of elected communist officials, achieved a political tour de force on Thursday by putting to the vote the CETA ratification bill provisionally applied since 2017 at the European level, but that the government had until now never put it on the agenda of the upper house.
The government is tempted to play for time
The communist deputies have already announced their intention to open the front in the Assembly by taking up the text of their senator counterparts on May 30, ten days before the European elections, but the government seems to want to procrastinate and could delay tabling the text on the table of the Assembly. Denouncing a “demagogic posture” on the part of “the French extreme left and right,” Ms. Hayer judged that a rejection would be “devastating for our French farmers and for the signal that would be sent to our European partners.”
“There are good deals, there are bad deals. Bad agreements, we oppose them, decided the president of the Renew group in the European Parliament, citing Mercosur, a free trade agreement with South America. The CETA agreement was and remains a good agreement for our sectors. »
