France reveals a silver lining of Trump 2.0
The French Trade Minister tells me France supports the EU-Australia trade deal
Donald Trump’s effect on Europe is not all negative. Alongside Europe’s long-overdue remarmament, France is finally shaking off its protectionist, anti-trade-deal posture.
France’s Trade Minister Nicolas Forissier has told me in an exclusive interview that France supports the trade deal Europe struck with Australia last month, describing it as ‘high-quality,’ ‘fair’ and ‘balanced.’
‘We’re trying to change our mindset, we’re no longer naive, we are in a positive, constructive, pragmatic dialogue with our partners, and we want to build some strong partnerships that are win-win,’ he said, speaking ahead of his visit to Australia.
‘France is very strong on this position — Europe can no longer be naive. We have to diversify our markets, our partnerships but also our supply chains.
‘Because the world is moving very fast, it’s very difficult today, international trade and the economic relations between countries are moving like tectonic plates, they are moving and there are shocks.’
It is hard to overstate what an enormous shift this is in the French position. France has long opposed a trade deal with Australia, first on the basis of beef imports over the decision made by Scott Morrison, the former centre-right prime minister, to renege on the submarine contract to pursue AUKUS with the United States and the UK.
France’s position on trade has always been self-defeating and contradictory.
On one hand, it is the European leader in pushing for ‘strategic autonomy,’ i.e. greater independence from Chinese and US trade, but on the other, it has been spooked into submission by its powerful farming lobbies into opposing EU-led attempts to diversify its markets for the good of the Union’s 27 member states.
(The EU Commission, rather than member states, has powers or competence over trade for the entire bloc or single market.)
For example, earlier this year, the French opposed the giant trade agreement the EU struck with the Mercosur countries. And in the European Parliament, French MEPs voted to defer the deal to legal scrutiny.
I asked Forissier if this was likely to happen to the Australia deal, which still needs to be approved by the European Council (leaders), the European Parliament and the Australian Parliament.
French Presidential elections are next year, and the far-right RN party is leading in the polls, making outgoing French President Emmanuel Macron’s support of any Australian intake of beef politically risky and brave. It also means the timing of any EU vote will be extremely sensitive, as it is likely next year.
Forissier could not say how French MEPs would vote in the European Parliament, but said the French government viewed the Australian deal differently to Mercosur.
‘The contingents of beef in the Australia-EU agreement are not at all the same as they were in Mercosur, I think it’s much more reasonable,’ he said.
This somewhat vindicates Australian farming lobbies and their representatives in the federal parliament, the Nationals, who complain that Australia did not secure enough access to the European market.
But the Nationals, who are in opposition, have only a small chance of blocking the deal. They would need crossbench support in the Senate, a not impossible scenario, but unlikely.
If the deal is to be opposed, it is more likely to be on the European side. But the French support is a powerful and significant endorsement for the European Commission ahead of any political bargaining. With powerhouses Germany and France both onside, it diminishes the bargaining power of other, smaller member states to form a bloc for horse-trading, such as what happened with Mercosur.
France’s support has caught many by surprise, including inside the EU Commission.
David Henig, Director of the UK Trade Policy Project at the European Centre for International Political Economy, and a long-time observer of EU trade policy as a UK civil servant, said Mr Forissier’s language was most ‘un-French-like’, but in a good way.
‘France is traditionally rather defensive on EU trade agreements, and this has continued recently with outright opposition to the deal with Mercosur,’ he said.
‘Open support for the EU-Australia agreement thus comes as a welcome surprise and suggests this deal should be ratified by European institutions.’
Trump, China, the cause
Asked what had prompted the enormous change in France’s position, Mr Forissier was emphatic, likening the global order to tectonic plates in motion.
‘The movements of these tectonic plates are very, very very brutal. For example, Trump and the United States and the Chinese have new ways of acting, and we have to react and be organised.
‘We are in a world of intensity and force and Trump, in a way, has delivered a good service to European countries because it helps us to move, to change, to have a new mindset.
‘In a way, it’s very helpful because it obliges European countries to be more united, to try to find some more pragmatic solutions and also new forms of cooperation.’
France’s reality check also includes the long-overdue recognition that trade deals should not start and end with agriculture and specifically beef. Australia’s vast supply of untapped critical minerals is key to Europe’s interest in the relatively small market, which has a population of just 27 million.
Western countries are working to break China’s stranglehold over the production of critical minerals, but are also competing against each other for supplies.
Forissier’s first port of call in Australia was to Western Australia to sign yet another agreement to collaborate on critical minerals with the Premier Roger Cook.
Australia and the EU signed an MOU on critical minerals in 2024, but it has gone nowhere. By contrast, the Trump Administration has begun co-financing Australian projects under the agreement signed between the president and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in the White House last year.
Australia’s federal Resources Minister Madeleine King urged France to put some money on the table.
‘It is sometimes not well understood that investment in projects from the beginning is what secures rights to purchase off-take in the future,’ she told me.
Offtake agreements, routinely used in the resources sector, allow the investor to secure supply at set prices, guaranteeing the producer a customer and the buyer a cushion against price volatility.
Diplomacy also a winner
This is undoubtedly a tick for Anthony Albanese’s diplomatic efforts with the French.
The Labor leader shows an almost embarrassing disinterest in geopolitics and national security. It is only because his predecessor left the France-Australia relationship in tatters over AUKUS that he made a song and dance about repairing it.
But whatever the motive, the result cannot be denied and is to be applauded. As he told me in his election campaign podcast interview last year, he feels closest to the French President Emmanuel Macron and the UK’s Keir Starmer on the world stage.
When I urged him to use his relationship with Macron to get France to stop blocking an EU-Australia trade deal, he was in full agreement.
‘That’s the plan,’ he said.
As for AUKUS, Forissier assured me that it is all in the past.
‘It’s not necessary to look at the past, of course, there was some kind of deception, but you have your reasons, what is important is the future, we’re close partners,’ he said.
Back to beef, there is an irony to the Nationals’ and farming lobby’s opposition to the deal Australia struck with the EU.
Australian beef quotas into the EU are indeed small, around 30,000 tonnes. The EU offered a similar amount to Australia in 2023, but Don Farrell, the Trade Minister walked out and ended talks.
Then, the Labor government had a slim majority in Parliament, and Trump 2.0 had not yet declared ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs on friendly nations, including the uninhabited Heard Islands.
Labor was spooked by the Coalition opposition, which it may have needed in a more contested parliamentary environment and by farmers who wanted a whole deal scuttled if they didn’t get their 50,000 tonne quota demand.
But following the May 2025 election and Labor’s 94-seat majority, Farrell was given more room to move. But by this time, the EU had already struck Mercosur and had fewer quotas to allocate. If Australia’s farmers and the opposition had been more flexible in 2023, they may have achieved a higher quota from Europe.
Reality checks can go both ways.