BRUSSELS ― The EU’s behemoth trade agreement with South America’s Mercosur bloc was — once again — kicked down the road on Thursday, as familiar internal rifts again proved stronger than the push to seal the deal.

An eleventh-hour turnaround from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni upended a self-imposed objective of signing the agreement with the Mercosur countries on Dec. 20 — pushing the decision to mid-January instead, POLITICO first reported.

The delay shows that after two decades of negotiations and countless turn-arounds, the EU-Mercosur pact, designed to create one of the world’s largest free-trade areas between the EU, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina, continues to be a political minefield in Europe. 

Long-standing opposition from France, Poland and Italy, where farming constituencies are influential, has turned the deal into a test of Brussels’ ability to rally allies abroad while holding together a deeply divided bloc. 

“Mercosur plays a central role in our trade agreements,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on her way into the leaders summit on Thursday morning, adding it was “of enormous importance we get the green light.”

Yet Meloni derailed the carefully laid plan.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said the Italian leader promised him on a call Thursday that she would support the deal as soon as she secured the backing of Italy’s farmers. Despite heaping pressure on Europeans in recent days, Lula ended up accepting the delay, the diplomats said.

Meloni’s pushback meant there was not enough backing from EU countries for von der Leyen to fly to Brazil this weekend to sign the deal as planned — despite the huge political capital invested on each side in trying to finalize it by the end before Christmas.

Even if Rome and Paris come around, the agreement’s troubles are far from over: The deal must still pass through the European Parliament, where opposition is mounting across the political spectrum.

For all the warning that an extra delay would be fatal, countries in favor of the deal, such as Germany, were quick to downplay the setback. 

“It seems certain that it [the Mercosur deal] will be signed in mid-January,” a senior German official told reporters.

The mid-January date is important, the official stressed, to get the agreement ratified before the Parliament has a chance to vote on a resolution to send the deal to the Court of Justice of the EU — which would risk freezing its ratification for up to two years.

“I hope that our partners in Latin America will have the patience to deal with this tentative and hesitant EU,” said Bernd Lange, the chair of the European Parliament’s trade committee.

Hans von der Burchard contributed reporting.