One less thing to worry about after Brexit

Hans Von Der Buchard has written an interesting profile on German anti-free trade campaigner Thilo Bode at Politico.

Since Bode, who is 69, entered the fray in 2014, support for TTIP in Germany has plummeted from 55 down to 17 percent, putting pressure on the most powerful country in the EU to drop its support. Major German trade unions, which once supported an agreement, now oppose it.

Bode’s book “The Free Trade Lie,” (in German, Die Freihandelslüge) is a best-seller, having sold 70,000 copies in the past 16 months. An anti-TTIP rally in Berlin in October 2015, which Bode helped organize, drew more than 150,000 people, making it the country’s largest political demonstration since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

More worryingly Bode no longer just has TTIP in his sights. He's also looking to block the CETA partnership, which covers trade between the EU and Canada.

Recently, Bode came a step closer to claiming his first scalp. Since the beginning of the year, he has expanded his campaign geographically and substantially, opening a new office in France — where skepticism over TTIP is mounting — and shifting his focus from the negotiations with the U.S. to the smaller but already completed EU-Canada deal, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. “If CETA [is successful], then TTIP will follow,” he said. His domino logic works the other way as well: If he can bring down one deal, he can also wreck the other.

Bode’s efforts were instrumental in creating the public pressure that caused the EU to drop plans to ratify the deal without involving national parliaments. The decision, taken by the European Commission, could prove to be a mortal blow to CETA, subjecting the treaty’s every deal to the approval of 38 national and regional legislative bodies. It also sets a precedent for TTIP and other future trade deals, potentially subjecting them to the same legislative bottleneck.

Striking up new trade deals after Brexit will be challenging, especially when you take into account our worrying lack of trade negotiators. But, Brexit Britain is at least safe in the knowledge that 7 years (!) of negotiations won't be scuppered by a German Greenpeace activist opposed to a completely different trade deal.