Macron and Merz press Brussels for a China trade instrument that activates unless members block it

Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz wrote jointly to Ursula von der Leyen on Monday 5 October, asking the European Commission to build a trade instrument capable of restricting a third country's access to the single market within days. Euronews, which reported the letter, said the two leaders want a "systemic reaction" instrument for cases where a third country "seeks to undermine the restoration of a level playing field" by political or economic means, producing "severe and systematic distortions". The design detail matters more than the language. The leaders want the instrument operated through comitology with a reversed qualified majority, so that a Commission measure takes effect unless a qualified majority of member states is opposed. The letter arrived two days before the EU trade commissioner flew to Beijing, and in the week China reaches the European Council agenda.

A letter that changes the default

According to Euronews, the letter carries four asks. The first is the systemic reaction instrument itself, which the two governments want "country agnostic" and able to "capture all market distortions, from a single production to a whole sector, from subsidies to currency manipulation". The second is the diversification instrument von der Leyen announced in June, intended to reduce dependencies and unwind supply-chain concentration in a single supplier country. The third is an inventory of possible retaliatory measures, with impact assessments broken down by member state, so that capitals know their own exposure before a dispute starts rather than after. The fourth is heavier use of what already exists: stronger anti-dumping, anti-subsidy and safeguard practice, cases framed at sector rather than product level, and more investigations opened by the Commission on its own initiative instead of on industry complaint.

The first and third asks work together. Trade defence in the EU has failed less often on evidence than on assembly: a measure that needs member states to come forward gives Beijing a target list of capitals to lobby. Reversing the qualified majority inverts that, making the obstruction the thing that must be organised. The European Parliament pushed in the same direction on 7 October, adopting a China resolution by 454 votes to 86 with 110 abstentions and urging the Commission to deploy the Anti-Coercion Instrument, which Euronews notes can reach as far as restrictions on licences and intellectual property rights. The ACI has never been used.

The deficit the letter is answering

Eurostat's figures give the quantitative case. EU goods imports from China were 154 billion euros in the second quarter of 2026 against 51 billion euros of exports, leaving a deficit of 103 billion euros, the widest since the 107 billion euros recorded in the third quarter of 2022. Imports rose 3.8 per cent and exports 5.7 per cent on the previous quarter. The gap has widened from 66 billion euros in the first quarter of 2024. Euronews describes the 2025 deficit as running at roughly 1 billion euros a day, and reports that every member state now runs a goods deficit with China, which removes the usual division between exporting and importing capitals.

The industrial argument is being made in employment terms. Euronews quotes Industry Commissioner Stéphane Séjourné saying "today we're losing thousands of jobs every week", and citing 250,000 industrial job losses last year. Germany's BDI federation, quoted in the same report, argues that "systemic competition with China's economy is increasingly calling into question the resilience of the open social market economy". Berlin's shift is the political content of the week: France has wanted faster instruments for years, and until now Germany, with the larger stake in the Chinese market, declined to co-sign.

Beijing's leverage and the Šefčovič trip

Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič travelled to Beijing on 7 October for two days of talks with Commerce Minister Wang Wentao. Euronews reports that the EU is seeking product-specific quotas on Chinese imports, and that China has rejected voluntary export restraints on electric vehicles as unfair competition, the main sticking point since negotiations began in June. The other half of the file is rare earths: China's near-monopoly on processed output, and the 2025 export restrictions imposed during its dispute with Washington, are what the Commission is trying to buy durable supply against. Šefčovič has said that returning without tangible results would produce a strong political movement among member states for harsher measures.

Both sides are already acting. The Commission imposed definitive anti-dumping duties of 40.5 to 67.1 per cent on Chinese pea protein by Regulation (EU) 2026/2101 of 25 September, for five years, on a market it values at about 175 million euros. Euronews reports that China has since opened an anti-dumping investigation into EU chemicals, read in Brussels as a matching response to the Commission's recent chemical cases. The pattern is small, reciprocal and expanding, which is the condition the Franco-German letter is written against: instrument-by-instrument escalation that neither rebalances the deficit nor stops.

What the instrument would and would not settle

Nothing was enacted on 5 October. The systemic reaction instrument does not exist, and creating one requires legislation the letter cannot supply; the reversed qualified majority applies to deployment, not to the decision to legislate, where the usual bargaining remains. The nearest precedent, the Anti-Coercion Instrument, shows that availability and use are separate questions. What the letter does settle is the position of the two largest economies going into the European Council, and that is the variable Beijing has historically worked on.

For a strategic reader the significant number is not the deficit but the voting rule. If the EU adopts activation-unless-blocked for market access restrictions, the cost of Chinese retaliation threats falls on whichever capital tries to assemble a blocking majority, in public, against a Commission finding of distortion. That is a different negotiation from the one conducted over electric vehicle tariffs in 2024. Whether it survives contact with the member states will be visible first in how much of the letter the European Council conclusions pick up, and second in whether Šefčovič comes back from Beijing with quotas or with a communique.

Sources

• Euronews — Germany and France agree new trade tool to counter China
• Euronews — EU-China trade tensions: five things to know as Brussels and Beijing face crunch talks
• Euronews — EU trade chief heads to Beijing under pressure to deliver on Chinese imports
• Euronews — MEPs urge tougher action against China as tensions hit critical point
• Eurostat — China-EU international trade in goods statistics
• European Commission, DG Trade — Commission acts against imports of pea protein from China
• European Commission, DG Trade — Trade news
• South China Morning Post — Germany joins France in call for China trade defences