The Mother of All Deals—Or the Mother of All Capitulations? On the lack of leadership at the EU level.

On January 27, 2026, the European Union and India announced the conclusion of what has been called "the mother of all deals"—a free trade agreement creating a market of two billion people after nearly two decades of negotiations. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hailed it as a landmark achievement. EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič declared it proof that "win-win trade is real."

But beneath the celebratory press releases lies a deal whose terms reveal something troubling about Europe's capacity to negotiate in its own interests—and raise uncomfortable questions about EU leadership more broadly.

The Asymmetry Problem

The headline numbers sound balanced: both sides will eventually eliminate tariffs on over 90% of goods. Look closer, and the picture changes.

The EU will eliminate import duties on 90% of Indian goods on the first day of implementation, with 99.5% liberalised within seven years. India, by contrast, will remove duties on just 30% of European goods on day one, with full liberalisation stretched over a decade.

This asymmetric timeline is not a minor technical detail. It creates a structural vulnerability at the heart of the agreement.
For the first six or seven years, Indian exporters enjoy near-complete access to European markets—textiles, chemicals, marine products, gems, leather goods all flowing tariff-free into a 450-million-person consumer bloc. European exporters wait. And wait. India's major liberalisation is backloaded, promised for years seven through ten.

The problem is obvious: what prevents a future Indian government, facing domestic political pressure, from renegotiating or simply exiting before the painful part kicks in? India walked away from RCEP at the last minute in 2019. It terminated dozens of bilateral investment treaties in 2016. The track record is not reassuring.

Symmetric timelines—"if you need ten years, we'll take ten years too"—would have cost India nothing it couldn't accept and would have aligned incentives throughout the implementation period. This is standard practice in trade negotiations between major economies. The EU-Korea FTA featured far more balanced phasing. That the Commission failed to secure equivalent terms from a country seeking access to the world's largest single market is, at minimum, a negotiating failure.

What the EU Gave Away

The timeline asymmetry is not the only concession. Consider what European negotiators sought and failed to obtain:

Agriculture and dairy: Excluded entirely. India will offer no concessions on dairy, including cheese—a major EU export interest. Beef, chicken, rice, and sugar are all carved out. European farmers, already furious about the Mercosur deal signed earlier this month, received nothing.

Geographical indications: Not covered. The EU typically fights hard to protect designations like Champagne, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and Prosciutto di Parma in trade agreements. This will be addressed in a separate negotiation—meaning it was dropped as a condition for closing the deal.

Government procurement: No chapter included. European businesses hoping for access to Indian government contracts were disappointed.

Investment liberalisation: The chapter was dropped entirely, with a vague commitment to finalise it within two years of the deal entering into force.

Services: The EU opened 144 sub-sectors to India. India opened 102 to the EU. This matters because services—financial, legal, accounting—are precisely where the EU has offensive interests.

What did Europe get in return? Gradual tariff reductions. Quota-based access for automobiles (not the deep liberalisation European carmakers wanted). Wine duties reduced from 150% to 20-30% over seven years. Olive oil duties eliminated.

These are not trivial gains. Access to a 1.4 billion person market, the world's fifth-largest economy soon to be third-largest, has real value. But the imbalance between what was given immediately and what was received on a deferred, conditional basis is striking.

Incompetence, or Something Else?

If an informed observer can identify the asymmetric timeline problem in five minutes, professional trade negotiators with months of preparation certainly saw it too. Which means they either couldn't or wouldn't fix it.

The charitable interpretation is that geopolitics demanded urgency. With the United States imposing 50% tariffs under President Trump's return to protectionism, the EU needed to demonstrate it could close major agreements and offer partners an alternative to American market access. A slightly lopsided India deal now may be worth more than a "perfect" deal in five years when the strategic window has closed.

The less charitable interpretation is that the Commission prioritises announcements over outcomes. Von der Leyen needed a headline for the summit. India held firm. Brussels blinked.

This pattern is not isolated to the India FTA. The Mercosur agreement, also concluded under von der Leyen's watch, has triggered farmer protests across Europe and faces legal challenge in the EU courts over concerns about environmental and labour safeguards. The vaccine procurement scandal—her personal text message negotiations with Pfizer's CEO, the contents of which she refuses to disclose—remains under investigation. The consistent thread is a preference for getting a deal over getting good terms.

Critics in Brussels increasingly describe a culture that rewards deal announcements rather than deal quality. By the time implementation problems emerge, the politicians who negotiated the terms will have moved on.

A Balanced View

Fairness requires acknowledging the defence.

EU average tariffs were already low—around 3.8%. India's tariffs averaged 9-10%. In relative terms, India's liberalisation represents a larger shift, even if the absolute European concessions are more immediately valuable.

The EU also secured a comprehensive mobility framework for Indian professionals, chapters on digital trade and intellectual property, and sustainability provisions that—on paper, at least—commit India to environmental and labour standards. Whether these prove enforceable is another question.

Perhaps most importantly, the deal creates European winners. Indian exporters who benefit from day-one access—textile manufacturers, chemical producers, marine processors—become a domestic constituency against future exit. If a future Indian government contemplates walking away, it will face opposition from industries whose livelihoods now depend on European market access. This institutional lock-in strategy is not naïve. It has worked in other contexts.

And the geopolitical logic is real. A rising India aligned with European economic and regulatory frameworks is vastly preferable to an India drifting toward Chinese standards and supply chains. Sometimes strategic positioning justifies economic sacrifice.

Whether these considerations justified the specific concessions made, reasonable people can disagree. What seems harder to dispute is that the Commission could have driven a harder bargain and chose not to.

The Deeper Problem: Leadership by Consensus

The India FTA may be less a story about one Commission President than about an institution structurally incapable of hardball negotiation.

Consider how EU leaders reach their positions. The Commission President is selected through consensus among 27 heads of government. Anyone with strong views, sharp elbows, or powerful enemies gets vetoed. The selection process rewards the inoffensive, the coalition-builders, the smoothers-over of differences. It does not reward people willing to fight.

Compare this to how national leaders emerge. Contested elections on actual positions. Coalition-building around ideas, not just interests. Real consequences for failure. The process selects for people willing to take risks, to stake out ground and defend it.

The EU process selects for skilled managers of rooms containing 27 veto players.

This is not an accident. Post-war European integration was designed to make decisive leadership difficult. The architects of the European project wanted to bind nations into structures where bold, unilateral action—the kind that had twice produced continental catastrophe—would be impossible. The boring consensus machinery was a feature, not a bug.

The problem is that the world has changed. A system designed to prevent European countries from fighting each other now faces external actors—Russia, China, an unpredictable America—who exploit exactly the weaknesses that design created.

Consensus machinery works when everyone shares basic interests. It produces paralysis when facing adversaries who do not.

The Federal Solution

There is a straightforward institutional fix: federalise and let people directly elect EU officials.

A directly elected Commission President would need a platform, would need to campaign, would need to defend their record. "I gave away EU market access for nothing" becomes a liability when you face voters, not an obscure detail buried in trade annexes.

Pan-European electoral competition would create genuine EU-level politics. Clear mandates would let leaders say "I was elected to do X" rather than "we found a consensus among 27 member states after 18 months of negotiation."

This does not happen because the people who would need to implement it benefit from the status quo. National leaders exercise power in Brussels without accountability, then blame Brussels at home. They will not vote to diminish their own relevance.

Small states fear domination by Germany and France in any directly democratic system. Eurosceptics argue there is no European demos, no shared political identity sufficient to sustain federal democracy. This is partly self-serving—elites who benefit from fragmentation defending their position—and partly genuine concern about the chicken-and-egg problem: you cannot have European political identity without European politics, but you supposedly cannot have European politics without European identity.

The result is a union too integrated to dissolve easily but too fragmented to act decisively. By design.

The French Question

As a French, I must ask myself if we could be the instrument for change. If federalisation requires forcing change from within, France is the only member state with the leverage to do it.

The structural position is unique. France generates roughly 70% of its electricity from nuclear power—energy independence that looks increasingly valuable as climate transition accelerates and German decisions to exit nuclear appear ever more like strategic errors. France possesses the only EU nuclear deterrent and the only serious power projection capability. It is the largest agricultural producer, a major budget contributor, and holds one of two EU permanent seats on the UN Security Council. Geography makes it irreplaceable: there is no functioning EU without France at its centre.

De Gaulle understood this leverage and used it. The empty chair crisis of 1965, the vetoes of British membership, the Luxembourg Compromise—all demonstrated that France could extract concessions through credible threats of non-cooperation.

Today's French leadership does not play this game. The reasons are complex: elite capture by a class that rotates between Paris and Brussels and shares interests in the status quo; the sacred mythology of the Franco-German partnership even as German interests diverged sharply from French ones; the absence of any domestic political platform that frames federalisation-through-French-power as a project worth pursuing.

French politicians complain about Brussels while quietly accepting its constraints. They have internalised the idea that confrontation is illegitimate, that France must move with Germany rather than against it, that using leverage is somehow un-European.

Conclusion

The EU-India FTA is not a catastrophe. It offers real benefits to European exporters and advances strategic objectives that matter. But it is also a deal whose terms reflect negotiating weakness, institutional incentives that reward announcements over outcomes, and a leadership selection process that filters out anyone willing to fight for European interests.

Whether these failures trace to one Commission President or to structural features of the European project itself, the remedy is the same: democratic accountability through direct elections that would force EU leaders to answer for their decisions.

France possesses the leverage to force this transformation—the energy, the military, the agricultural and budgetary weight to make continued dysfunction costlier than reform.

The leverage exists. The leadership to use it doesn't... For now. ​😎?