‘If she makes it through the night, she’s safe’: how many times have we heard that from doctors in the movies?
Well, for Europe, the night to overcome will be that of Friday 19 December. From that night it can emerge strengthened and cured of its historical ills, or it can emerge virtually dead.

Already at its meeting on Thursday, the European Council will face a tricky vote on the seizure of Russian assets to support Ukraine. But the next session will be even more incandescent, as the showdown over the trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur will be staged.

An agreement that has been debated for a good 25 years, which is always obstructed or postponed for the same reason (pressure from the agribusiness lobby), but which in today’s world, unrecognisable from that of 2000, has become a matter of life and death.

Economic boost

Mercosur is a bloc of Latin American countries that includes Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and on paper Venezuela (currently on stand-by due to sanctions against the regime).
We are therefore talking about a giant of over 300 million inhabitants.
At the moment, its member countries have every interest in importing European flagship products such as industrial machinery, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and automobiles without barriers.
They also need an outlet market for their agricultural resources, such as sugar, rice, maize, soya and meat (especially poultry).

The agreement would abolish customs duties on 91% of the goods currently traded between the two sides of the Ocean, triggering an increase in trade worth an estimated 50 billion (of which 14 billion for Italian companies alone, more than the entire GDP growth in 2025).

This is in the immediate term. Nothing, however, excludes that in the coming decades some Mercosur economies will evolve, that the interchange will expand to more technologically sophisticated goods and that the countervalue will increase accordingly (an estimated +77 billion for Europe and +9 billion for the Mercosur countries by 2040).

But these cold numbers only tell part of the story.
The reasons to close the deal by Christmas do not lie only in the cash flow of the companies.
Nor do they lie only in the relief that millions of workers would feel as their factories found new customers after six quarters of industrial decline.
Nor are they just in the relief that the poorest families would feel, finding Mercosur meat and cereals at discount stores with prices finally within their reach.
The most important reasons for closing the deal are eminently political, in the highest sense of the word.

An oasis of stability

First of all, Europe would send a message of stability and confidence that the world desperately needs today.
Indeed, since Donald Trump inaugurated the era of customs wars, no country has the confidence that its historical partners will not turn their backs on it overnight by imposing tariffs for purely domestic propaganda reasons.
Moreover, the imperialist aggressiveness of the Russians and Chinese is encouraging nations everywhere to friendshare, i.e. to build value chains that only include other nations ‘of their ilk’, thus making them more precarious and more expensive.

The obvious consequence of all this is inflation.
An unstable world, where no one can be trusted, is a world where prices can rise without warning and without remedy.
It is also a world where investing is less convenient, unless you invest in gold or cryptocurrencies.

And so, if a free trade area between 31 countries where 750 million human beings live really does come into being by Christmas, it would be a sign of hope in contrast to the anxious news of recent years.
This is the first reason why Europe, and with it Italy, would emerge strengthened from Friday night.

Not only favelas: a new look at Latin America

“Politics”, however, also means proposing a cultural and spiritual narrative to explain who one is and with whom one is united. And in this the Mercosur agreement is even more strategic.

To Trump’s people it would tell them that there are no ‘backyards’, that the Americas are not destined by any divine decree to suffer their ‘pre-eminence‘, that Latin American peoples decide with whom they associate in full freedom and on a basis of full equality.

He would tell the Chinese that the ‘new Silk Road‘ loan-shark agreements are not the only possible model for developing former Third World countries.

To the Latin Americans he would say that we no longer see them as a mass of poor peons, campesinos and slum dwellers to be pitied, but as a second Europe across the sea, which is already united with us by consanguinity, language and history, and will soon be united with us by business too.

In them we no longer see the eternal victims, the eternal losers waiting for a Guevara or a Chavez to lead them hasta la victoria to the delight of our radical chic.
On the contrary: Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela are names that have long evoked prosperity and hope, and we want them back.

If Italy and the EU make it through Friday night, in short, they will have turned the narrative about themselves, Latin America and how trade relations should work in today’s world upside down.

Opponents of the agreement

A success in the face of which all the arguments against signing the agreement pale into insignificance.
Arguments which, let us remember, insist exclusively on the agricultural side. As President Macron, the leader of those against, said, ‘the agreement does not protect French farmers enough’, and therein lies the problem.

We would say: and why should we give priority precisely to French farmers out of 750 million people living in the EU and Mercosur?
Why not the Italian workers?
And what have Portuguese restaurant owners and German biomedical researchers done wrong?

Ruralism as the supreme phase of capitalism

It has to do with the fact that today’s Europe, elderly and clerical as it is, has become hypersensitive to the buzzwords of the rural world, perceived as the guardian of a supposedly healthy, innocent life in harmony with nature.

Hence the accusations such as: “The Mercosur agreement will accelerate the deforestation of the Amazon!” Forgetting that, if the agreement with us failed, the one with China, much less tender towards the environment, would take over, and that in Bolsonaro’s time the Amazon was cheerfully razed to the ground without us having any negotiating leverage to prevent it.
The choice is not between a deal with us and primitive life in the forests: it is between a deal with us and a deal with more cynical partners.
The emissaries of the Mercosur countries have made it very clear: if the agreement is not signed by Christmas, ‘we dig a hole, throw it in and cover it with cement‘. There is a queue outside anyway.

Another evergreen is ‘unfair competition’, due to the fact that agrarian entrepreneurs in Mercosur countries do not have the same obligations as ours towards the environment and animals.
On the other hand, in Europe we pay between 180 and 205 euros per person per year in subsidies for agrarian enterprises: a figure that Brazil or Argentina cannot even dream of. To impose the same environmental obligations on them as we do would be unfair competition, indeed: as the Brazilians and Argentines maliciously say, it would be ‘neo-colonialism’.
Why, instead, not take the opportunity to make a serious cost-effectiveness analysis of each individual European environmental obligation, and judge how many are really indispensable?

Finally, it is said that importing food from Mercosur would be dangerous for our health, because Brazilian or Argentinian controls would not be reliable.
In part this is true, but in part it is also a racist myth.
If we take the most dangerous cases (intoxicating heavy metals and pathogenic bacteria), reports on food traded between European countries were 70% and those on food imported from abroad 30%: roughly the same proportion as there is between the quantities of products traded intra-EU and extra-EU. They may be unreliable, but we too have room for improvement.

With pitchfork at throat

Be that as it may, this morning all these fears led the European Parliament to amend the agreement by introducing ‘safeguard clauses‘: if the quantity of sugar, meat, maize or rice on sale in the EU were to increase by more than 1/20 in three years (i.e. a nonnulla), the duties against the Mercosur countries would be triggered again.
So much for those in Europe who cannot put lunch and dinner together.

Paranoid control, distrust and veiled racism are already ruining the agreement of the century, at the behest of agrarian entrepreneurs.
In three days comes the final vote. Italy is the straw that stirs the drink.
Will we make it through the night?