Bernd Lange has nothing intimidating about him. The 70-year-old German MEP does not have the flair of a polished politician, nor does he enjoy the popularity of lawmakers who were once household names back in their home countries.
His unassuming figure, however, stands in contrast to the outsized role he has played in steering Europe’s international trade agreements for over two decades, a job that’s only grown in importance as free trade is in retreat.
While trade wonks in Brussels, Washington and Beijing might have known Lange for years, the wider public probably first heard about him only recently, when he led the Parliament’s mutiny against an unpopular trade deal with the U.S.
Last year, only a few months after returning to power, U.S. President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on dozens of trading partners, including the European Union. The European Commission engaged in months of negotiations, resulting in an in-person meeting between the American president and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at Trump’s golf course in Turnberry, Scotland. If ratified, the so-called Turnberry deal would target EU exports to the U.S. with sweeping 15% tariffs, while most American imports to the bloc would be brought under a tariff-free regime.
Then, earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down those tariffs on the grounds that the U.S. administration lacked the legal authority, in a move that sent the U.S. administration scrambling to replace them with new levies. In Brussels, that triggered another period of uncertainty — precisely what the bloc had so desperately sought to avoid by bowing to Trump’s demands last summer.
The ruling came just weeks after Trump had explicitly called for taking over Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory that’s part of NATO.
For Lange and many of his fellow lawmakers, that was a step too far.
In February, they responded by suspending ratification of the agreement, which requires approval from the Parliament and the bloc’s 27 member states, while demanding assurances from Washington that its terms would be honored. The move put Lange on the radar of American media, often uninterested in the mechanics of European policymaking in Brussels.
Yet, after dragging their feet for over a month, lawmakers eventually gave in at the end of March, though not after having attached a series of provisions that, if featured in the final text of the legislation, would allow the EU to walk away if the White House fails to keep its word.
“We are not really keen ... to reduce the tariff for U.S. goods without condition,” Lange told The Parliament in an exclusive interview. A “sunrise clause” would allow the deal to enter into force only when the U.S. lowers tariffs on EU steel and aluminum to 15%, while a “sunset clause” would make the deal expire automatically on March 31, 2028, meaning that any extension would be contingent on a new legislative proposal.
But Lange suggested that the usual rules don’t always apply when your counterpart is not only your largest trade partner, but also the de facto guarantor of your security.
When the EU struck the agreement, which most experts deemed deeply unequal, EU officials defended it as the only way to stabilize strained relations and avert a worst-case scenario: Washington pulling the plug on assisting Ukraine’s defense in its fight to fend off Russia’s four-year war of aggression.
But Lange didn’t buy that argument and remains persuaded that the EU folded too quickly.
“If I were the president of the Commission, I would really act in a different way,” he said.
Just days after Lange spoke with The Parliament, amid the EU’s refusal to back Trump’s war in Iran, the U.S. president announced that he would bring tariffs on European cars and trucks to 25%, accusing Brussels of failing to comply with the Turnberry deal. Lange didn’t mince his words when responding on social media.
“This latest move demonstrates just how unreliable the U.S. side is,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
“This is no way to treat close partners. Now we can only respond with the utmost clarity and firmness, drawing on the strength of our position.”
From teacher to trade negotiator
Few in Brussels would remember a time when Lange was not running the show of the Parliament’s international trade committee.
He was first elected to Europe’s legislative body in 1994, bidding goodbye to his career as secondary-school teacher in Burgdorf, a town of 30,000 people in Germany’s Lower Saxony state in the northwest of the country. On paper, the transition could hardly seem more abrupt, but Lange never saw it that way.
After all, Lange joined Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party when he was still a high school student. For him, politics was very much about understanding what kept society together — the question he had asked himself before choosing to study theology, philosophy and political science at the nearby University of Göttingen.
During his first stint as an MEP, he was assigned to the environmental committee. Yet it wasn’t until his reelection in 2009, after a five-year break during which he had worked for the German Trade Union Federation following an electoral defeat, that Lange began working on trade issues — an area that later came to become nothing short of a “calling,” according to a European Parliament insider who asked to remain anonymous.
From that moment on, Lange’s political career took off. In 2014, he became the chair of the Committee on International Trade, ultimately becoming a trustworthy figure to those in the Brussels trade world.
“He’s a rock in the sea in a moment where a lot of people don’t seem to have good political intuition vis-a-vis the U.S.,” said David Kleimann, a trade analyst with the German Institute of Development and Sustainability, who briefly worked for Lange as parliamentary assistant.
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Illustration by Federica Di Sario
Transatlantic relations
Much of Lange’s parliamentary career was spent shaping trade ties with the U.S.
When I asked whether the shift under the Trump administration felt particularly disappointing after years of dialogue with Washington, his reply was “yes and no” — an expression that in his native German would be translated as “jein.”
The reason for that, in his view, is that the U.S. had been leaning toward a more protectionist stance since the global financial crisis of 2007–2009. A kind of “homeland economy” was slowly but inevitably embraced across successive U.S. administrations, he argued.
While former President Barack Obama was strongly in favor of a free trade agreement with the EU, he also championed some protectionist policies, including introducing tax penalties for companies offshoring jobs and granting subsidies to firms manufacturing at home. Then, during Trump’s first term, the U.S. imposed tariffs on European steel and aluminum. While the administration of Joe Biden sought to mend ties with the EU by dropping the steel levies, it kept the aluminum tariffs imposed under Trump.
To Lange, hoping to preserve the transatlantic relationship forged in the aftermath of World War II is now a lost cause.
“We are not partners anymore. We are really competitors,” he said. “This is the reality of today.”
After all, the lawmaker had a front-row seat to shifting transatlantic ties.
He became the Parliament’s trade committee chair a year after talks over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership — a framework with the U.S. aimed at reducing trade barriers and aligning regulations — had started. But over time, positions hardened on both sides, and negotiations ultimately stalled amid divergences neither side could bridge. In 2019, a note from the European Council formally declared TTIP “obsolete” and “no longer relevant.”
“We should be a bit more strong, self-confident and perhaps take away the picture of this transatlantic coalition,” which he said was "really gone now.”
Last year, as Trump pressured trade allies into accepting unfavorable deals, the EU struggled to muster the unity needed to deploy its so-called “trade bazooka” — formally known as the Anti-Coercion Instrument — the bloc’s most powerful trade defense tool.
Pulling the trigger would have meant threatening to shut U.S. companies out of EU public contracts. Yet fears of even stronger retaliation from Washington made export-oriented countries such as Italy and Germany reluctant to move ahead.
Keep calm and put the hours in
Over the years, Lange has forged a reputation as a clear-minded political operator who keeps his cool no matter what.
“He is always very calm,” said Daniel Mullaney, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, who met Lange in his previous post as chief U.S. negotiator for European issues.
Anthony Gardner, who served as U.S. ambassador to the EU between 2014 and 2017, recalled Lange as a European politician with whom he could always have a “respectful discussion … based on facts.”
“He’s not someone who chases headlines,” said Gardner, now an executive advisor at Brookfield Asset Management. He argued that, even when talks heated up, as in the case of the Investor-State Dispute Settlement, a controversial mechanism allowing foreign investors to launch a lawsuit against states, the discussion remained anchored in mutual respect and factual arguments, unlike other negotiators, who “only aim to score political points.”
Similarly, the Parliament insider noted that Lange "doesn't get flustered — except when he has IT problems...that really sets him off."
Beyond that, Lange is famously meticulous in his preparation for any meeting or negotiation — a striving for perfection that’s as appreciated by fellow negotiators as it is dreaded by those who work for him.
“There was hardly a down moment — just a lot of work,” recalled the Parliament insider, who has been working alongside the German politician for nearly a decade.
But his workaholism, something akin to a Protestant work ethic, is not something Lange feels he has to apologize for.
“It’s true. I’m a working dog,” he said.
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