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enlargement was more important than the preferences of his Green Party coalition partner on CAP reforms” (Swinnen 2011, 62). This allowed the two countries to take the initiative and sort out differences between themselves before the negotiations began. th Hence, at the 11 hour, in September 2002, French and German chief negotiators reached an agreement on CAP financing for the next multi-annual budget framework (2007-13). This agreement laid out how CAP spending ought to be distributed not only in the new member- states but also in the rest of the EU (Garzon 2006, 99). As one Commission official summarised it to Johan F.M. Swinnen (2011, 61), “the French agreed with the enlargement if the Germans agreed to pay the bill”. The agreement, which can be conceptualized as a classic ‘two actors- two issues game’, contained two elements. Firstly, Chirac and Schröder agreed that direct payments should not be extended to the new member states on an equal basis with the older member states. Instead, they favoured a 10-year transition, starting with a level of 25 per cent of the direct payments the old member states were going to receive in 2004. Secondly, in order to make sure that their position received enough support from the middle-ground countries such as Greece, Belgium, Luxembourg, Finland, Austria and Italy (Swinnen 2011, 61), the Chirac-Schröder agreement included a cap on CAP spending, or, more precisely, they decided that the market-related expenditure and direct payments combined would never be allowed to exceed €45.3 billion. (Garzon 2006, 99) Until Chirac was able to use the anti-Iraq war alliance with Schroder to keep the latter on his side in the CAP debate, there was no community-level ZOPA for reform. However, Fischler and his administration then decided to ask one of the pro-reform domestic chief negotiators, Tony Blair, to try to counter the Franco-German alliance. More precisely, Swinnen (2011, 62) writes that Fischler asked Blair to approach José María Aznar, the Prime Minister of Spain at the time. Spain was chosen because its minister of agriculture, Miguel Arias Cañete, “was 40