“The president of the European Commission (Ursula von der Leyen) and Prime Minister Meloni have been in regular contact, the president is in constant contact with all the leaders,” said Arianna Podesta, spokesman for the head of the Community Executive.
“Of course, (EU’s commercial policy) is our exclusive competence, but the approach is very welcome and closely coordinated,” said the spokeswoman, who later recalled that this Monday the Commissioner of Commerce, Maros Sefcovic, arrives in Washington to try a negotiated departure from the tariff war initiated by the US administration.
Podesta has detailed, in fact, that both commanders have been in contact in “the last days” in relation to the Italian trip to Washington and that they will be “before” that Meloni maintain the encounter with Trump.
“As the president herself has said in an interview, every approach to the United States is welcome,” said the spokeswoman, to underline then that the competition to negotiate trade agreements falls to the European Union, as the treaties recognize.
In this way, the Community Executive maintains the same position wielded before the recent trip of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, to China, with which the EU also maintains commercial tensions but seeks an approach for a “tangible rebalancing”; When community services pointed constant contacts between leaders and coordination in the messages transferred to Beijing.
Double route: negotiation and reprisal preparation
In any case, the European Commission has indicated that its services continue with its “double track” strategy to combine dialogue efforts with the Trump administration for an agreement that allows you to avoid tariffs with the preparation of the different rules of reprisals to activate in the event that the dialog fails.
Brussels announced last week a truce to “give a chance to the negotiation” so it decided to suspend for 90 days its first round of countermeasures that should be activated on Tuesday and impose 25% surcharges to purchases for 21,000 million to the United States.
Von der Leyen warned when announcing the suspension that retaliation can be reactivated at any time if the negotiation is frustrated and added that the preparation of the second roda of countermeasures is still underway, although community sources specified that the progress of the works will not be announced while the negotiation works.
In the range of options that Europeans weigh for an eventual second round, “all possibilities are still on the table,” according to SEFCOVIC spokesman, Olof Gill, in reference to the option of assessing the great technological ones in the United States as part of the anticoration measures that can use the 27 against economic pressures of third parties.
In this space for negotiation, Trump reduced indiscriminate tariffs that imposed all European imports-the rate that calls “reciprocal” despite not corresponding to equivalent measures on the EU side-but keeps both European purchases and aluminum purchases and aluminum European and the other 25% that impousment to the car and components from the EU.