Neither Labour nor the SD was under any illusion that a free trade area would easily be accepted by the French. As early as March 1958, the Labour national executive had concluded that Paris was unlikely to take the FTA seriously now the Community was fully operational. These doubts were only strengthened when in June de Gaulle returned to power and soon made clear French support for the EEC. It took just over a month, until a meeting of the NEC on 21 July, for Labour formally to conclude that the FTA negotiations were now far more likely than not to collapse. Jens Otto Krag meanwhile accurately captured the mood of impending defeat in a meeting of Nordic governments in late September. Western European states, Krag recognised, faced ‘changing conditions’ now de Gaulle occupied the Élysée Palace, and it was unclear if the FTA proposal would survive them.

Despite these gloomy assessments, in the months preceding Soustelle's press conference, neither party was yet ready to abandon its support of the free trade plan. It helped of course that Labour and the SD each continued officially to rule out membership of the nascent EEC. Without much else by way of an alternative European policy it therefore made logical sense publicly to support the FTA while allowing matters to take their course. It also helped that failure of the negotiations, while expected, appeared by no means certain. The SD government had in fact been encouraged by a somewhat abstract agreement on tariffs submitted in mid-March by Guido Carli, the Italian minister for foreign trade, seen as proof that EEC members did remain eager to achieve progress on a Europe-wide trade area. And as late as 5 November Krag indicated that he was still hopeful that Britain and France, always the two dominant actors in the negotiations, would reach a compromise. But far more important than either of these aspects was that both Labour and the SD remained genuinely supportive of the FTA in and of itself. The mixture of expected economic benefits offered by a Europe-wide trade area and the political advantages of a solution based on the intergovernmental OEEC that had first made the FTA desirable in mid-1956, remained as attractive in late 1958. No other framework could come close to meeting the various political and economic requirements of the two groups.