Alex Trelinski
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump has – as expected- announced 20% tariffs on EU member states including Spain.
“Our country has been looted, plundered, raped and robbed,” he said in a Wednesday night address from the White House Rose Garden.
Steel, aluminium, cars and their components will have tariffs of 25%, plus there will be taxes on the import of pharmaceutical products, microprocessors, wood and copper.
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The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen responded: “The consequences will be dire for millions of people around the planet.”
She warned that food and medicines will be more expensive and referred to ‘chaos that is being created’.
She added that ‘we cannot absorb global excess capacity’, and that the EU cannot buy everything that is not now going to be sold to the United States.
As for EU reprisals, Von der Leyen stated: “We are already finalising a first package of countermeasures in response to the tariffs on steel”.
“We are now preparing for other countermeasures, to protect our interests and our companies if the negotiations fail,” she added.
Spain’s Economy Minister, Carlos Cuerpo, said the government will provide ‘a safety net’ to the most affected sectors in the country.
The Minister of Digital Transformation and Public Function, Oscar Lopez, commented that Spain ‘does not want to fuel a trade war’ with the United States but insisted that Europe has tools to respond and that Spain will react within the European framework.
The Spanish Wine Federation (FEV), warned that the tariffs could be a ‘a significant blow to wineries’, with America the second largest export market, and the first for sparkling wines.
The FEV’s general-director, Jose Luis Benítez, said the measure is totally unjustified and that ‘it will harm Spanish and European wineries but also American consumers, who consume more wine than they produce, and will cause economic uncertainty and price increases in the US and the EU’.
