Key EU Brexit Negotiator Is Named Europe’s Top Trade Bureaucrat
Key EU Brexit Negotiator Is Named Europe’s Top Trade Bureaucrat
(Bloomberg) --
The European Union’s deputy chief Brexit negotiator, Sabine Weyand, was named the bloc’s top civil servant for trade policy in a move that represents a small piece in the puzzle over new appointments to EU leadership posts.
Weyand, a German native, will succeed Frenchman Jean-Luc Demarty as director general for trade in the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, on June 1. Demarty has been in the highly coveted post since 2011 and in the commission for the past three decades. The Brussels-based commission announced Weyand’s promotion in a statement on Wednesday.
The director general for trade is influential because the commission runs the commercial policy of the 28-nation EU. The role supports the bloc’s trade commissioner, a political position currently occupied by Cecilia Malmstrom and due to become vacant in November.
Other high-profile posts that the EU plans to fill in the coming weeks and months as the incumbents’ terms expire include the presidencies of the commission and the European Central Bank, the chair of the bloc’s meetings of national leaders, and the role of foreign-policy chief.
Weyand, 55, will begin her new commission trade job with the U.K. still in the EU as a result of the House of Commons’ repeated failure to approve a withdrawal agreement reached between the British government and its 27 partners in the bloc.
She helped craft the deal over 18 months alongside her boss, Michel Barnier, and the Brexit postponement has delayed talks on a free-trade accord between the EU and Britain.
Weyand’s in-box will be stacked high anyway. Europe is negotiating market-opening pacts with countries from Australia to South America and is engaged in commercial fights on several fronts. Transatlantic relations feature a joint goal to cut industrial tariffs and an EU effort to keep at bay the threat of much-dreaded U.S. duties on European cars.
The bloc is also:
- challenging the U.S. at the World Trade Organization over American metal-import duties based on the same national-security grounds that U.S President Donald Trump would invoke for any auto levies
- Involved in longstanding tit-for-tat disputes against the U.S. at the WTO over aid to plane makers Boeing Co. and Airbus SE
- Seeking to prevent a looming deadlock on the WTO’s appellate body as a result of a U.S. refusal to consider any appointments on the grounds the forum’s members have strayed from their original mandate
- Working with the U.S. and Japan to help the WTO tackle industrial subsidies by China
- Pursuing a WTO case against Chinese technology-transfer practices
To contact the reporter on this story: Jonathan Stearns in Brussels at jstearns2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ben Sills at bsills@bloomberg.net, Richard Bravo, Andrew Blackman
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