EPA The TTIP blame game Recriminations follow delayed vote on EU-U.S. trade deal.

STRASBOURG — The last-minute decision to delay a key vote on an EU-U.S. free-trade agreement sparked an immediate blame game among the measure’s backers in the European Parliament on Wednesday.

Parliament sources said that European People’s Party (EPP) chief Manfred Weber had pushed Parliament President Martin Schulz to postpone the vote by sending the resolution back to committee, while EPP sources accused Schulz and Bernd Lange, the Socialist chair of the International Trade Committee (INTA), of forcing the delay after they failed to reach a compromise.

The vote had been scheduled for Wednesday at noon, but that plan was scrapped late on Tuesday amid internal divisions within the Parliament’s second-biggest party group, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists & Democrats (S&D).

The sudden change of plans illustrates how controversial the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has become for Europe. At the G7 summit earlier this week, U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged a rapid conclusion to the trade talks.

Behind the scenes, Parliament’s political groups have been horse trading for months, especially within the S&D, over how to reach a compromise amendment on the so-called Investor State Dispute Settlement Mechanism (ISDS), a private arbitration system now standard in many trade deals. The provision has become a key sticking point in TTIP.

Critics fear the implications of allowing companies in one country to sue governments in another country if an investment runs into problems.

Last month, the EPP and S&D adopted compromise language that attempted to get around the opposition to ISDS — but not all members of the S&D were on board.

According to Jude Kirton-Darling, a Socialist UK MEP who sits on the INTA committee, the point of dispute was that the compromise amendment would have been rejected by the full Parliament.

Crucial backing

Although Parliament’s approval is not essential at this stage, it is considered vital for the project’s success, as it will eventually have to give a green light to the final trade pact.

“Everything started in March when S&D took a position on investment protection stating that we support No-ISDS,” said Kirton-Darling.

But when they went to the vote in INTA, other groups like the EPP, the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) and European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) said that they would veto the whole resolution if the S&D adopted an anti-ISDS amendment.

So, said Kirton-Darling, “if we voted for that, we would have vetoed effectively the whole of the report and that would have killed the process in the European Parliament.”

The danger, then, was to risk the Parliament voting for an amendment that then would have forced the EPP to reject the whole deal and dilute the Parliament’s position on the issue.

“By failing to adopt a strong text on this dossier, the European Parliament would weaken its power on one of its key, hard fought prerogatives,” said Schulz.

On Wednesday morning, there was not even an agreement to disagree publicly, as MEPs voted in plenary session to postpone their debate on the measure.

But even without a public debate on the floor of the assembly, the finger-pointing and sound-biting was furious after the decision to put off the vote. “If the EPP had shared the amendment there would have been a majority,” said Gianni Pittella, the president of the S&D group.

Christofer Fjellner, an EPP MEP, blamed the Socialists. “This is a complete embarrassment for the Socialists & Democrats group,” he said. “They screwed up the resolution so much so that they had to call in Schulz with his extraordinary authority to change the agenda already set by plenary.”

Now, say two different sources in the S&D group, it is very unlikely that the plenary will vote on the deal next month.

That means the earliest the full European Parliament could be expected to have its say on TTIP is in September.

Hans von der Burchard contributed to this article.