EU delays massive free-trade deal with South American bloc Mercosur

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union is delaying a massive free-trade deal with South American countries after fiery protests by farmers and last-minute opposition by France and Italy threatened to derail the pact, seen by its backers as an important geopolitical move for both continents.

Top EU officials had hoped to sign the EU-Mercosur deal in Brazil this weekend, after 26 years of negotiations. Instead, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Friday after a tense EU summit that the signature will be delayed ‘’a few extra weeks to address some issues with member states.''

Experts say the delay could dent the EU’s negotiating credibility globally as it seeks to forge new trade ties amid commercial tensions with the U.S. and China. Once ratified, the trade deal would cover a market of 780 million people and a quarter of the globe’s gross domestic product, and progressively remove duties on almost all goods traded between the two blocs.

French President Emmanuel Macron welcomed the postponement, as did French farmers unions, who fear the deal would undercut their livelihoods. France had led opposition to the deal between the EU and the five active Mercosur countries — Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia. Italy raised new reservations Wednesday.

Thursday's agreement for a delay was reached between von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa on the sidelines of the EU summit with Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, on the condition that Italy would vote in favor of the agreement in January, an EU official said.

The decision came hours after farmers in tractors blocked roads and set off fireworks in Brussels to protest the trade deal, prompting police to respond with tear gas and water cannons.

The farmers brought potatoes and eggs to throw and waged a furious back-and-forth with police. Protesters burned tires and a faux wooden coffin bearing the word “Agriculture.” Their fire unleashed a black cloud that swirled with white tear gas. The European Parliament evacuated some staff due to damage caused by protesters.

“We are fighting to defend our jobs,” said Armand Chevron, a 23-year old French farmer.

Hundreds of farmers like Pierre Vromann, 60, had arrived on tractors, which they parked to block roads around the key institutions of the EU.

The Mercosur deal would be “bad for farmers, bad for consumers, bad for citizens and bad for Europe,” said Vromann, who raises cattle and grains in the nearby Belgian city of Waterloo.

Other farmers came from as far away as Spain and Poland.

Macron dug in against the deal upon arrival at Thursday's summit, and wouldn't commit to supporting the deal next month either. He said he has been in discussions with Italian, Polish, Belgian, Austrian and Irish colleagues among others about delaying it to address farmers' concerns.

“Farmers already face an enormous amount of challenges,″ he said, as farmer protests over the trade deal and a cattle disease roil regions around France. “We cannot sacrifice them to this accord.”

Worried by a surging far right that rallies support by criticizing the deal, Macron's centrist government has demanded safeguards to monitor and stop large economic disruption in the EU, increased regulations in the Mercosur nations like pesticide restrictions, and more inspections of imports at EU ports.

Italy's Meloni also warned against signing the agreement this week.

“Work is underway to postpone the Mercosur summit, which gives us a few more weeks to try to provide the answers our farmers are asking for, the safeguards that are necessary for our products, and thus enable us to approve the Mercosur agreement,'' she said early Friday.

Von der Leyen needs the backing of at least two-thirds of EU nations to secure the deal. Italy’s opposition would give France enough votes to veto von der Leyen’s signature.

In Greece, farmers have set up roadblocks along highways across the country for weeks, protesting delays in agricultural subsidy payments as well as high production costs and low product prices that they say are strangling their sector and making it impossible to make ends meet.

Supporters say the EU-Mercosur deal would offer a clear alternative to Beijing's export controls and Washington's tariff blitzkrieg, while detractors say it will undermine both environmental regulations and the EU's iconic agricultural sector.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said ahead of the Brussels summit, “If the European Union wants to remain credible in global trade policy, then decisions must be made now.''

The deal is also about strategic competition between Western nations and China over Latin America, said Agathe Demarais, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “A failure to sign the EU-Mercosur free trade agreement risks pushing Latin American economies closer to Beijing’s orbit,” she said.

The political tensions that have marked Mercosur in recent years — especially between Argentina’s far-right President Javier Milei and Brazil’s center-left Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the bloc’s two main partners — have not deterred South American leaders from pursuing an alliance with Europe that will benefit their agricultural sectors.

Lula has been one of the most fervent promoters of the agreement. He was betting on closing the deal Saturday and scoring a major diplomatic achievement ahead of next year’s general elections. He said he was surprised by Italy’s hesitancy.

At a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Lula was clearly irked by Italy and France's positions.

“If we don't do it now, Brazil won't make any more agreements while I'm president,” Lula said, adding that the agreement would “defend multilateralism” as Trump pursues unilateralism.

Milei, a close ideological ally of Trump, also supports the deal.

“We must stop thinking of Mercosur as a shield that protects us from the world and start thinking of it as a spear that allows us to effectively penetrate global markets,” he said some time ago.

Associated Press writers Debora Rey in Buenos Aires, Claudia Ciobanu in Warsaw, Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin, Elene Becatoros in Athens, Gabriela Sá Pessoa in Sao Paulo, and Sylvain Plazy and Lorne Cook in Brussels contributed to this report.

A protestor sits on a curb injured during a demonstration of European farmers near the European Parliament in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Marius Burgelman)

Police try to disperse protestors during a demonstration of European farmers near the European Parliament in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Marius Burgelman)

A protestor picks up tire to throw onto a fire during a demonstration of European farmers outside the EU Summit meeting in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Marius Burgelman)

Protestors burn tires during a demonstration of European farmers outside the EU Summit meeting in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Marius Burgelman)

French President Emmanuel Macron speaks with the media as he arrives for the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Omar Havana)

A fire burns in a barrel as European farmers block a road with their tractors during a demonstration outside the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Marius Burgelman)

Police stand behind a barrier as European farmers block a road with their tractors during a demonstration outside the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Marius Burgelman)

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speaks with the media as she arrives for the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Omar Havana)

A farmer drives a tractor with a sign that reads in Dutch 'Don't forget, without farmers there's no food' during a demonstration outside a gathering of European leaders at the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Marius Burgelman)

Farmers drive their tractors to block a main boulevard during a demonstration outside a gathering of European leaders at the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Marius Burgelman)

A farmer puts wood in a fire during a demonstration outside the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Omar Havana)

Protestors and farmers stand next to a wood fire during a demonstration outside the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Omar Havana)

Farmers use their tractors to block a main road during a demonstration outside a gathering of European leaders at the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Omar Havana)

LONDON (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have been damning of the U.K.'s naval capabilities. Their jibes may have stung in a country with a long and proud maritime history, but they do carry some substance.

The U.K. has been at the forefront of Trump’s ire since the onset of the Iran war on Feb. 28, when British Prime Minister Keir Starmer refused to grant the U.S. military access to British bases.

Though that decision has been partly reversed with the decision to permit the U.S. to use the bases, including that of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, for so-called defensive purposes, Trump is adamant he was let down. He has repeatedly lashed out at Starmer and branded the Royal Navy’s two aircraft carriers as “toys.”

“You don’t even have a navy,” he told Britain's Daily Telegraph in comments published Wednesday. "You’re too old and had aircraft carriers that didn’t work.”

Hegseth, meanwhile, said sarcastically that the “big, bad Royal Navy” should get involved in making the Strait of Hormuz safe for commercial shipping.

For numerous reasons, the Royal Navy is not as big and bad as it used it to be when Britannia ruled the waves. But it's not as feeble as Trump and Hegseth imply and is largely similar with the French navy, which it is often compared with.

“On the negative side, there is a grain of truth, with the Royal Navy being smaller than it has been in hundreds of years,” said professor Kevin Rowlands, editor of the Royal United Services Institute Journal. “On the positive side, the Royal Navy would say that it’s entering its first period of growth since World War II, with more ships set to be built than in decades.”

It’s not that long ago that Britain could muster a task force of 127 ships, including two aircraft carriers, to sail to the south Atlantic after Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands. That 1982 campaign, which then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan was lukewarm about, marked the final hurrah of Britain’s naval pedigree.

Nothing on that scale, or even remotely, could be accomplished now. Since World War II, Britain’s combat-ready fleet has declined substantially, much of it linked to changing military and technological advances and the end of empire. But not all.

The number of vessels in the Royal Navy fleet, including aircraft carriers, destroyers frigates and submarines has fallen from 166 in 1975 to 66 in 2025, according to The Associated Press' analysis of figures from the Ministry of Defense and the House of Commons Library.

Though the Royal Navy has two aircraft carriers at its command, there was a seven-year period in the 2010s when it had none. And the number of destroyers has halved to six while the frigate fleet has been slashed from 60 to just 11.

The Royal Navy faced criticism for the time it took to send the HMS Dragon destroyer to the Middle East after the war with Iran broke out. Though naval officials worked night and day to get it shipshape for a different mission than the one it was readying for, to many it symbolized the extent to which Britain’s military has been gutted since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

For much of the Cold War, Britain was spending between 4% and 8% of its annual national income on its military. After the Cold War, that proportion steadily dropped to a low of 1.9% of GDP in 2018, fuel to Trump's fire.

Like other countries, Britain, largely under the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, sought to use the so-called “peace dividend” following the collapse of the Soviet Union to divert money earmarked for defense to other priorities, such as health and education.

And the austerity measures imposed by the Conservative-led government in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008-9 prevented any pickup in defense spending despite the clear signs of a resurgent Russia, especially after its annexation of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine.

In the wake of Russia's full-blown invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and with another Middle East war underway, there's a growing understanding across the political divide that the cuts have gone too far.

Following the Ukraine invasion, the Conservatives started to turn the military spending tide around. Since the Labour Party returned to power in 2024, Starmer is seeking to ramp up British defense spending, partly at the cost of cutting the country's long-vaunted aid spending.

Starmer has promised to raise U.K. defense spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product by 2027, and the updated goal is now for it to rise to 3.5% of GDP by 2035, as part of a NATO agreement pushed by Trump. That, in plain terms, will mean tens of billions pounds more being spent — a lot more kit for the armed forces.

The pressure is on for the government to speed that schedule up. But with the public finances further imperilled by the economic consequences of the Iran war, it's not clear where any additional money will come.

The jibes will likely keep coming even though the critiques are unfair and far from the truth, said RUSI's Rowlands, who was a captain in the Royal Navy.

“We are dealing with an administration that doesn’t do nuance," he said.

This story has been corrected to show there were 166 vessels in 1975, not 466.

An artillery piece from the 1982 Falklands War between Argentina and Britain lies on Mount Longdon on the Falkland Islands, also known as Islas Malvinas, Monday, March 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan)

FILE - The Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales is pictured before its port call in Tokyo, Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)

FILE - Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks to Royal Marines onboard the HMS ST Albans in Oslo, during his visit to Norway on Friday, May 9, 2025.(AP Photo/Alastair Grant, Pool, File)

FILE - Indonesian soldiers stand guard as Royal Navy offshore patrol vessel HMS Spey is docked at Tanjung Priok Port during a port visit in Jakarta, Indonesia, Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana, File)

FILE - Crews walk near the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales before its port call in Tokyo Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)