Top trade lawmaker Bernd Lange delayed a transatlantic deal for months, frustrating both Washington and Brussels. While he didn’t get everything he wanted, he says he got what Europe needed.
By CAMILLE GIJS, MAX GRIERA and NETTE NÖSTLINGER in Brussels
Illustration by Natália Delgado/POLITICO
June 16, 2026
2:09 pm CET
Bernd Lange doesn’t come across as the kind of man who would easily rile an American president.
The 70-year-old German Social Democrat is mild-mannered, methodical and most at home in the committee rooms and hallways of the European Parliament. Yet over recent months, the chair of the Parliament’s trade committee has become the most visible internal obstacle to a transatlantic trade deal that many lawmakers regard as one-sided — and as exposing the EU dangerously to the whims of Donald Trump.
The deal, struck last July by Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at his golf resort in Turnberry, Scotland, was swiftly turned into a joint statement and endorsed by European governments. For Brussels, the logic was simple: Deliver on the EU’s side of the bargain, avoid a tariff war, and preserve what remained of transatlantic stability.
Lange had other ideas.
Backed by a coalition of center-left, liberal and Green lawmakers who distrust Trump and resent the asymmetry in the deal, Lange used the Parliament’s role in the implementing legislation to demand safeguards. He wanted to ensure that the EU could claw back its concessions if Washington failed to keep its promises — especially after Trump threatened to annex Greenland and later menaced Spain with a trade embargo for opposing America’s war on Iran.
“Of course, a lot of people took over this U.S. narrative, ‘you have to do it quick and fast and so on, regardless of what’s in it,’” Lange told POLITICO in an interview.
“But of course this is not my style,” he said, leaning back in a leather chair in his Parliament office overlooking the rooftops of Brussels.
Bernd Lange participates in an exchange of views with Maroš Šefčovič at a meeting of the Committee on International Trade in the European Parliament in Brussels in January 2025. | Martin Bertrand/AFP via Getty Images
The months of delay fueled frustration in Washington, to the point that Trump threatened last month to hike tariffs further should the EU not make good on its promises by July 4.
The bloc dodged that bullet when its institutions struck a hard-fought compromise that incorporated some of Lange’s key demands. That deal will now be put to a final plenary vote on Tuesday; Lange is quietly confident of victory.
POLITICO spoke to a dozen current and former colleagues of Lange, staff, diplomats and officials in Brussels, Paris and Germany to learn more about the man who built this parliamentary coalition. For some, he is a methodical operator who is stubborn and protective of his files — and willing to push counterparts to the limits in pursuit of a deal. For others, he went too far in daring to destabilize the transatlantic relationship.
The Greenland moment
Under last July’s transatlantic truce, the EU promised to pass legislation to remove tariffs on U.S. industrial goods. In return, Washington agreed to cap tariffs on most EU exports at 15 percent and to lower levies on European cars.
As the lawmaker in charge of negotiating the Parliament’s position on that legislation, Lange soon became decisive in setting — and slowing — the pace of the talks.
The first cracks in the truce appeared in August, just before Brussels and Washington published their joint statement enshrining the deal, when Trump imposed an eye-watering 50 percent tariff on over 400 products containing steel and aluminum.
But it was Trump’s threat early this year to annex Greenland, a Danish protectorate, that proved the real turning point.
A February U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down Trump’s original tariffs , and the ensuing transatlantic acrimony over the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, hardened the resolve of Lange’s coalition in the Parliament to freeze the process until the deal could be “Trump-proofed.”
The stalling frustrated the center-right European People’s Party, the biggest group in the Parliament — home to von der Leyen and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz — which repeatedly urged that the pact be implemented to provide stability to European business.
Lange and Željana Zovko during trilogue talks on customs duty regulations on May 19, 2026. | EP
Lange had overreached for nothing, in the view of Željana Zovko, the EPP’s top negotiator on the file.
“The ordeal was very unnecessary in the end and it pushed us to the brink of a trade war,” Zovko told POLITICO.
“At a moment when we could have focused on ensuring a close partnership on security and on how to work with China, we were fighting over peanuts and we lost the broader geopolitical vision.”
Industrial heartland
Lange’s skepticism toward the Turnberry deal is partly rooted in his home state of Lower S…
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