“Resume Negotiations”
Lindner wants a free trade agreement with the USA
03/20/2022, 12:25 p.m
The talks on the TTIP free trade agreement collapsed six years ago. Federal Finance Minister Lindner now wants to start a new attempt in order to be able to trade duty-free with the USA in the future. According to experts, apart from the Ukraine war, there is another decisive reason to strengthen free trade.
Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner is calling for a new attempt at a free trade agreement with the USA. “We should resume negotiations on a transatlantic free trade agreement,” he told the “Handelsblatt” in an interview. “Right now, in the crisis, it shows how important free trade is with partners in the world who share our values,” emphasized Lindner, with a view to the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. The finance minister added: “We should learn from the experience of the TTIP talks.”
In 2013, the EU and the USA began negotiations on the so-called TTIP agreement, which was intended to facilitate transatlantic trade. However, the plans were put on hold at the end of 2016 and have not been picked up again since. There had been major public protests against the project. In Germany in particular, a controversy erupted at the time about the alleged establishment of parallel justice by private arbitral tribunals and an alleged lowering of environmental and consumer standards. But against the background of the new geopolitical world situation, the idea is revived.
In addition to the Ukraine war, experts fear that China could also decouple itself economically from the West. The President of the Center for European Economic Research (ZEW), Achim Wambach, told the “Handelsblatt” that supply bottlenecks and strategic dependencies speak in favor of “concluding more trade agreements overall and especially with allies like the USA, instead of doing so for so long as in the past to watch them being torpedoed until they are doomed”.
Trade economist Vincent Stamer from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW) said: “If China were to break away as a sales market, we would have to provide adequate alternatives beforehand.” Stamer emphasized: “In these times, a European-American trade agreement is needed more urgently than ever.”