As Washington raises its tariff walls, Brussels keeps collecting trade partners, and rebranding free trade as self-defence.
The European Commission brought its interim agreement with the four Mercosur countries into force on May 1, after Argentina and Uruguay ratified it and a negotiation that had run for a quarter of a century finally closed. Fredrik Persson, president of BusinessEurope, the continent’s largest employers’ federation, had already called a separate deal struck with Australia in March a win for both sides. Agreements with India, Indonesia and Mexico were concluded or activated over the same 12 months. By the autumn the EU held preferential arrangements with 80 countries.
Maroš Šefčovič, the commissioner for trade and economic security, had framed 2025 around three problems: calming relations with the United States, answering a more assertive China, and turning a sharp rise in other countries’ appetite for deals into signatures. His talks with Washington over a customs agreement, which he later called the hardest assignment of his career, ran to hundreds of hours. American tariffs by then applied to allies and rivals alike.
DG Trade, the Commission’s trade department, set out the results last week in its sixth annual report on the enforcement of trade policy. Goods trade with preferential partners grew by 3.1 per cent over the year, against 1.4 per cent for trade with the rest of the world. The gap was wider on the farm, where agri-food exports to countries with a deal rose by 4.6 per cent while those to everyone else fell by 3.6 per cent. The 44 agreements in force at the end of 2025, with 76 partners, covered 46.3 per cent of the bloc’s external trade.
Denis Redonnet, the Commission’s chief trade enforcement officer, is the official who compiles the document. His teams had 20 trade barriers removed, in whole or in part, across 14 countries during the year, and a Commission mission to Brazil in October 2025 cleared several of the obstacles facing European exporters there. The report steered firms, small ones above all, towards Access2Markets, its portal for checking tariffs and rules of origin. Redonnet himself spent part of the summer overseeing the revised rules for screening foreign investment, which reached the EU’s statute book in June.
Trade and security
Šefčovič made the security case explicitly on September 9, telling an audience of German diplomats that openness and economic security now had to advance together. Trade, as he has put it elsewhere, is a business in which everything can be weaponised. The report gave him the figures. Preferential partners supplied a quarter of the EU’s critical raw materials, and imports of those materials from Canada rose by 62 per cent to 3.3 billion euros. Congo’s government banned cobalt exports in October 2025, squeezing the European refineries that rely on them, before replacing the ban with a quota that caps shipments through 2027. More than a quarter of the EU’s mineral imports now arrive from Canada.
BusinessEurope struck a warier note of its own. Its spring economic outlook, published in September, forecast EU export growth of just 1.7 per cent for 2026, new agreements and all. The deal with Chile, in force since February 2025, shows what one can manage: bilateral trade reached 20.8 billion euros in its first 11 months, with EU machinery exports up nine per cent and chemicals eight. Exports to partners holding a deal rose by 250 billion euros over the year, while sales to Russia fell by 54.5 billion.
The Commission is now negotiating with Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, and has signed narrower pacts on digital trade and investment with Singapore, South Korea, South Africa and Angola. Once the deals already agreed take effect, preferential terms will cover 53.3 per cent of the EU’s trade. For the export-reliant economies of central and eastern Europe, wired into German and Italian supply chains, every new market is one more hedge against the next disruption. Redonnet presents the report to partner organisations in Brussels on October 20.
Photo: Dreasmtime.