August 9, 2026

Newsletter

The European Post

Policy • Diplomacy • Strategic Insight

LATEST
Pension Savings Rules Get a Reset as the EU Scraps the 1% CapMedicine Shortages Move to the Heart of Europe’s Pharma ResetJapan Becomes Europe’s Closest Security Partner in AsiaCan Europe’s New Zealand Deal Anchor It in the Pacific?Chip Research Binds Europe and South Korea CloserMinimum Prices Replace Tariffs in Europe’s China Car DealBrussels and Beijing Keep Talking While the Trade Gap WidensKorean Weapons and EU Loans Now Bankroll Europe’s RearmamentNew EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips AwayPension Savings Rules Get a Reset as the EU Scraps the 1% CapMedicine Shortages Move to the Heart of Europe’s Pharma ResetJapan Becomes Europe’s Closest Security Partner in AsiaCan Europe’s New Zealand Deal Anchor It in the Pacific?Chip Research Binds Europe and South Korea CloserMinimum Prices Replace Tariffs in Europe’s China Car DealBrussels and Beijing Keep Talking While the Trade Gap WidensKorean Weapons and EU Loans Now Bankroll Europe’s RearmamentNew EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips Away
August 9, 2026

Newsletter

The European Post

Policy • Diplomacy • Strategic Insight

LATEST
Pension Savings Rules Get a Reset as the EU Scraps the 1% CapMedicine Shortages Move to the Heart of Europe’s Pharma ResetJapan Becomes Europe’s Closest Security Partner in AsiaCan Europe’s New Zealand Deal Anchor It in the Pacific?Chip Research Binds Europe and South Korea CloserMinimum Prices Replace Tariffs in Europe’s China Car DealBrussels and Beijing Keep Talking While the Trade Gap WidensKorean Weapons and EU Loans Now Bankroll Europe’s RearmamentNew EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips AwayPension Savings Rules Get a Reset as the EU Scraps the 1% CapMedicine Shortages Move to the Heart of Europe’s Pharma ResetJapan Becomes Europe’s Closest Security Partner in AsiaCan Europe’s New Zealand Deal Anchor It in the Pacific?Chip Research Binds Europe and South Korea CloserMinimum Prices Replace Tariffs in Europe’s China Car DealBrussels and Beijing Keep Talking While the Trade Gap WidensKorean Weapons and EU Loans Now Bankroll Europe’s RearmamentNew EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips Away

Indonesia and Europe Seal a Trade Pact a Decade in the Making

Achraf Hakimi
Bureau Chief, Trade Policy

Jakarta: After nearly ten years of stop-start negotiation, the European Union and Indonesia have turned their Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement from an aspiration into a finished text. The significance is easy to undersell precisely because it arrived without theatre. A political agreement struck between Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and President Prabowo Subianto in mid-2025 hardened into concluded negotiations later that year, and the deal is now moving toward formal signature in 2026, with entry into force targeted for early 2027 once the European Parliament and Indonesia’s legislature give their consent.

The headline numbers explain why Brussels persisted. The agreement removes duties on roughly 98.5 percent of tariff lines, covering almost all trade by value between the two economies. For European exporters that means cheaper access for cars, machinery and agri-food into a market of more than 280 million people. For Indonesia it locks in tariff-free entry for textiles, footwear and processed goods, and lends Jakarta the kind of rules-based anchor that a mid-sized power values when the trading order around it looks increasingly transactional.

The deeper story is strategic. Europe has spent three years trying to diversify away from concentrated dependence on China, and Southeast Asia is where that ambition is being tested. Indonesia is the largest economy in ASEAN and a major supplier of the nickel, cobalt and other inputs that European battery and clean-tech supply chains need. By tying market access to commitments on raw-material access and investment protection, the CEPA is as much an industrial-policy instrument as a trade deal. It sits alongside Brussels’ separate pacts with Vietnam and its talks with the Philippines as bricks in a wider Indo-Pacific wall.

None of this makes ratification a formality. Indonesia’s export restrictions on raw nickel ore, designed to force processing onshore, have already produced friction at the World Trade Organization, and the CEPA’s compromises on those measures will be scrutinised in Jakarta as keenly as its tariff schedule is in Strasbourg. European civil-society groups, meanwhile, warn that the deal’s environmental safeguards are too soft to police palm-oil expansion and deforestation, and they will press the Parliament to extract firmer guarantees before granting consent. Indonesian officials counter that the EU’s own deforestation rules already amount to a non-tariff barrier dressed as climate policy, a grievance that the agreement papers over rather than resolves.

What the pact does achieve is to convert a long-running courtship into a durable framework, and frameworks matter more than communiqués. The hard work now shifts to implementation plans, regulatory alignment and the unglamorous business of customs procedures that determine whether headline tariff cuts translate into real trade. If Brussels can show that a deal with the developing world delivers for both sides without hollowing out European standards, it strengthens its hand everywhere else it is negotiating. If it cannot, the CEPA will become a cautionary tale. The signatures expected this year are therefore a beginning, not a conclusion, and the most consequential arguments over what this partnership actually means are only now starting.

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