Politicisation, Baptist-bootlegger coalitions and political entrepreneurs. Explaining stalemate in EU-Mercosur negotiations

In 2019, the European Union reached a trade and association agreement in principle with the four Mercosur countries, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Soon after, French president Macron as well as the Irish parliament gave loud voice to the alarm about Amazon deforestation, emphasizing the lack of Brazilian commitment to the climate clauses in the agreement and the Paris climate agreement of 2015. This effectively led to a stalemate in the finalisation of the agreements, as these require approval by all individual member states. In this paper, we wonder why it came to this and put two potential explanations to the test. The outcome of the EU-Mercosur being conditionally vetoed in public may well have been the consequence of increased politicization and contestation by concerted action on the part of a coalition of opponents ratcheting up salience, engaging in actor expansion and stimulating issue polarisation. It may, however, also have been due to political entrepreneurs in government responding to a Baptist-bootlegger coalition dynamic. In that case, agricultural producers and environmental groups might not join forces, but their vocal concerns could signal the existence of a broad, but compartmentalized, support base which can be linked through a policy response by political entrepreneurs. We investigate these two possibilities by conducting a network analysis using Twitter data and political leaders’ statements as reported in print media. Our analysis shows that agricultural producers (the bootleggers) and environmental groups (the Baptists) indeed acted in relative isolation, only to be brought together by political entrepreneurs. By linking the issue of trade liberalisation to the issue of environmental protection, these policy entrepreneurs have now occasioned the Mercosur side, and more in particular the Brazil side of the negotiations, to have to choose between regulatory upgrading in its Amazon forest policies, or loss of the economic benefits from a more open EU market under the EU-Mercosur deal.