Strasbourg: It took the European Union and India almost twenty years to agree on a free trade deal, and it may take a determined minority in the European Parliament rather less time to put that achievement in jeopardy. The agreement concluded in New Delhi on 27 January, the largest the bloc has ever signed, binds together economies that account for roughly a quarter of global output and two billion people. On paper it is a triumph of patience. In practice it has entered the phase where European trade agreements most often falter, the long passage from political signature to legal ratification.
The numbers explain why Brussels wanted the deal so badly. The Commission estimates that tariff cuts on close to 97 percent of European exports will save firms as much as four billion euros a year. European carmakers, long shut out of India by duties that reached 110 percent, will see those tariffs fall to 10 percent over five years, with a quota for 250,000 vehicles. In return India secured immediate duty-free access for the labour-intensive goods on which millions of its workers depend, textiles, leather, footwear, gems and jewellery. It is, by design, an exchange of European industrial reach for Indian market access, with each side protecting what it could not concede.
Yet the politics of ratification rarely reward such symmetry. The agreement needs a qualified majority in the Council, the consent of the Parliament, and domestic approval in India before it can take effect, plausibly in early 2027. The first obstacle has already appeared. Members of the Parliament have voted to seek an opinion from the European Court of Justice on the deal’s legal architecture, a procedural step that sounds technical but can delay ratification by many months. Behind it lies a substantive complaint. The agreement’s chapter on trade and sustainable development is weaker than those the EU has insisted upon elsewhere, and the Green group, along with parts of the centre-left, argues that Brussels has quietly lowered its own standards to get the deal done.
That criticism is not easily dismissed. The EU has spent a decade telling its trading partners that labour rights and climate commitments are not optional extras but conditions of access to its market. An agreement with the world’s most populous country that softens those conditions invites the charge of double standards, and gives every future partner a precedent to cite. Defenders of the deal counter that an India tied into European supply chains is more likely to raise its standards over time than an India left to deepen its commercial ties with Beijing, and that the strategic case for anchoring New Delhi to the West outweighs the imperfections of a single chapter.
Both arguments have merit, which is precisely why the coming months will be difficult. The Commission has framed the agreement as a hedge against an unreliable Washington and an assertive China, a way of diversifying away from dependence on either. The Parliament, jealous of its power and wary of being treated as a rubber stamp, is unlikely to let that framing pass without extracting concessions. The likeliest outcome is ratification, but a slower and more conditional one than the Commission would prefer. The deal that survived two decades of negotiation must now survive its own authors, and that has never been a formality.
