PARIS — France’s inability to block the EU-Mercosur trade deal on Friday allows opposition parties to twist their knives into an already weakened Emmanuel Macron for the rest of his presidency.

Hostility to the landmark agreement — largely over the vulnerability of farmers to exports from South America — unites French politicians across the spectrum, and they now need someone to blame.

France’s Europhile president failing to stop the accord is a humbling reflection of the fading power of Paris in the EU, where it was long notorious for its exceptionalism and veto power.

Jordan Bardella, head of the far-right National Rally and front-runner for the presidency in 2027, accused Macron of being a hypocrite by pretending to oppose the deal and “betraying French farmers” by not doing enough to stop it.

Bardella said the National Rally would submit a motion of no confidence against the government. The far-left France Unbowed submitted its own motion Friday morning after France was “humiliated” in Brussels, party heavyweight Mathilde Panot said.

While those efforts are unlikely to succeed, parliamentary debates on the trade deal will again remind the French public that Macron could not to stand up to Brussels. The more center-leaning political forces are calling on French authorities do to more in the coming days to stop the deal, rather than take down the government.

Leaders from the conservative Les Républicains and the Socialist Party, ideological opponents, both urged Macron’s government to take the fight against the trade deal to the Court of Justice of the European Union.

“We have abdicated, abandoned our food sovereignty,” Les Républicains leader Bruno Retailleau, another likely presidential hopeful in 2027, said Thursday.

French farmers who descended Thursday on Paris to vent their fury parked tractors outside the Arc de Triomphe and the National Assembly, where they confronted both National Assembly President Yaël Braun-Pivet and Agriculture Minister Annie Genevard. One held a poster saying that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen “really takes us for idiots.”

Frédéric-Pierre Vos, a National Rally lawmaker who represents a rural district in northern France, stood alongside them and slammed the Mercosur deal as “a sacrifice of French agriculture to save the German car industry.”

With the deep unpopularity of the agreement at home, Macron has been left in the uncomfortable position of having to oppose the deal, while trying to defend the concessions he obtained.  

Writing on X, Macron said Thursday he was fighting for “farming sovereignty” and hailed pledges from the European Commission to increase the budget for the Common Agricultural Policy in the next EU budget. 

An Elysée official on Thursday also told reporters that “a number of advances” had been made on the trade deal, including clauses that would protect European farmers and consumers from sudden floods of goods from Latin America.

The French president also tried to strike a defiant tone, insisting “the signature of the agreement is not the end of the story” in his statement online.  

But for Macron, the sting of this loss is likely to last.  

His political opponents — especially the National Rally — are sure to seize on the vote as a public humiliation for France ahead of local elections in March and next year’s presidential race.

Victor Goury-Laffont contributed to this report.