BERLIN — German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is demanding that Brussels strike a trade deal with the United States within days, as concerns grow that the EU will end up with an unbalanced agreement that only benefits Donald Trump. 

Pushing the issue onto the agenda of Thursday’s EU leaders’ summit, Merz this week slammed the European Commission’s negotiating strategy as “far too complicated.” He called for greater urgency and focus in dealing with the U.S. president — a demand he said he would put to other EU leaders together with France’s Emmanuel Macron and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.

Leaders are impatiently awaiting an update from the EU executive over dinner on its talks with the Trump administration — just as concerns mount across the bloc that all goods might be hit with a “reciprocal” 50 percent tariff as soon as July 9 should Brussels and Washington fail to strike a deal. 

Having poured scorn on Britain’s recent trade deal with the United States, which locked in a 10 percent baseline tariff while offering some relief for car and steel exports, the bloc is now coming to terms with the prospect that it will struggle to do better.

“I still hope that a trade power like the EU, with 450 million people, has more leverage than the U.K.,” a senior EU diplomat said on Wednesday. 

The German chancellor says the priority should be to spare Europe’s — and particularly his own country’s — car, manufacturing, semiconductor, pharma, and steel and aluminum industries from the industry-specific tariffs that Trump has imposed or threatened to apply.

Those are the levies that Trump is most attached to, however, as he deploys the highest U.S. tariffs since the Great Depression of the 1930s to force manufacturers to bring their production stateside and close America’s trillion-dollar trade deficit. The U.S. trade deficit with the 27 EU member nations totaled $232 billion in 2025, or about 19 percent of the overall figure. 

Behind Merz’s demand is a persistent concern that Brussels could come up with a broad framework around a flat 10 percent tariff for most common goods, instead of sorting out the sectoral duties such as on cars that he says are hurting German exporters.

Keeping the broad-based tariff in place “is not the mandate we’ve given the European Commission,” said a second EU diplomat, who like others cited in this story was granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations. 

“We hope that the Commission will try to find a solution for the most exposed sectors,” they added.

Uphill battle

Merz’s call to get the job done faces two roadblocks.

First, the EU negotiating team has warned that Washington will only offer up minor concessions, such as restricted tariff reductions tied to limited quotas, after which the full tariff rate would apply. That’s far from the zero-tariff deal Merz initially hoped to achieve and would resemble the U.K.’s deal — the only one to be struck with Trump so far.  

Meanwhile, discussions with the U.S. are particularly thorny on cars, Germany’s biggest ask. 

Merz and Germany’s automakers want a mechanism put in place that will allow them to offset vehicle imports into the U.S. with models they export from their production facilities there. 

Economy Minister Katharina Reiche put forward such a proposal on a visit to the U.S. earlier this month. BMW and Mercedes-Benz have big factories in the U.S. that produce some models for worldwide export. But with the EU exporting more than 750,000 vehicles to the U.S. each year, it’s unclear how much relief a limited quota pact would offer automakers should Trump turn up his nose at the offer.

Brussels, meanwhile, is hoping that Trump’s long-held desire that the EU match U.S. car regulations will be a strong enough lever to get him to ease up on the auto sector. 

In a scoping document sent to member countries in May, the Commission said it is offering to match U.S. regulations on self-driving vehicles — a massive concession after similar discussions around car reciprocity helped tank a transatlantic trade deal a decade ago.

A question of balance

What’s more, European officials and diplomats fear that any deal they get will ultimately be one-sided, with the EU having to make far larger trade concessions to the U.S. than Brussels gets in return.

“If the deal gets too imbalanced, it will get a very bad reception by most of our national public opinions,” one EU official told POLITICO. They said the EU side cannot accept an unbalanced deal without risking its “backfiring” and fueling “strong” criticism from EU countries.

Those fears are shared in Germany, Europe’s leading export nation.

“We see a lot of turbulence still, and I’m not sure about the deadline of July 9, whatever comes out,” said Christian Forwick, director general for external economic policy at Germany’s Economy Ministry.

Forwick signaled that Berlin could live with a baseline tariff level — if it brings predictability — but not with Trump’s higher, sectoral tariffs.

“My concern would be more the uncertainty and the unpredictability of these tariffs,” he told an Aspen Institute panel in Berlin on Wednesday. “If we change these tariffs every few weeks, it’s not possible for companies doing business on the transatlantic market to plan.”

“I’m thinking of the car sector, for example — there’s a very high tariff of 25 percent … If we go for a tariff of 25 percent or more, this is really the end of our trade relations.”

Hans von der Burchard and Jürgen Klöckner reported from Berlin, Camille Gijs and Jordyn Dahl from Brussels, and Ari Hawkins and Daniel Desrochers from Washington. Jacopo Barigazzi contributed reporting.