SINGAPORE — German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Tuesday that the European Union is seeking deeper cooperation on open market access to counter restrictions on global trade, naming Southeast Asia and members of the CPTPP trade pact among its priority partners.

Speaking during a visit to Singapore, Mr. Merz said the world is changing, and that the EU — a 27-member bloc home to 450 million consumers — has become more active in seeking and building partnerships to expand free trade based on open competition, reliability and a rules-based order.

“This is a deliberate counterpoint to what we are currently seeing … we want to do things differently and we want to show that there is a better way,” Mr. Merz told a press conference.

The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) is a trade pact comprising 12 countries, including Japan, Britain, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia. Britain became the pact’s first new member when it joined in late 2024, extending the agreement beyond its original Pacific-rim lineup.

Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said his country will push to make progress on a free trade agreement between ASEAN and the EU when it takes over the rotating chairmanship of the Southeast Asian bloc in 2027. The EU already maintains bilateral free trade agreements with several ASEAN members — including Singapore and Vietnam, whose accords took effect in 2019 and 2020 — and negotiations with others are ongoing. A previous attempt at a region-to-region EU-ASEAN trade pact was shelved in 2009 in favor of pursuing bilateral deals.

“We recognize that it will be challenging. It’s complex, but we can also have some confidence in moving forward,” Mr. Wong said of the proposed pact.

Mr. Merz added that he has called on the EU to better coordinate its existing bilateral trade frameworks with partners such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and India to “open up better opportunities for us and our businesses in the region.” Negotiations toward an EU-India trade agreement resumed in 2022 after a near-decade pause, one existing track that such coordination could draw on.

He also said the EU would be willing to take part in an ASEAN initiative to integrate the region’s power grids and to cooperate more closely on defense and security. The ASEAN Power Grid, first envisioned in the late 1990s, aims to link the electricity networks of the bloc’s 10 member states and enable cross-border power trade.

— Reuters