A sign outside the European Commission offices in Brussels.

The headline about Thilo Bode on the Politico newspaper left in my Brussels hotel room was unequivocal: “The man who killed TTIP”. And the road in front of the Commission building where trade talks are underway was littered with glitter and confetti, left there by protesters early in the morning who proclaimed: “TTIP – Game over!” One of the stakeholders representing European dairies opened his presentation at the session regularly dedicated to lobby groups with a line in the sand: “No TTIP without better protection of our Geographical Indications (GIs) in the US”.

The loud public furore over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership has been raging virtually from the start of the negotiations three years ago.

The more cynical in Brussels say that NGOs were left without a suitable whipping boy and that trade deals were the perfect new campaign. Standing up to globalisation? Capitalism? America? What’s not to like?

Perhaps a clue comes from the posters put up around Schuman Square by Friends of the Earth, urging that it was ‘time for a different EU’, which puts stopping TTIP in the same list as #Fossilfree and #Refugeeswelcome.

The loud public furore over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership has been raging virtually from the start of the negotiations three years ago

Of course, facts rarely get in the way of a campaign once it gets rolling. Looking back, many of the red flags could perhaps have been handled better from the outset: whether American GMOs would flood the EU market? Whether corporates would exploit the dispute mechanism to sway government environmental policies by threatening litigation? There are now myriad handouts available, published not only by the EU and the US but also by German trade institutes, for example, categorically debunking some of the myths and reassuring people about their fears. They are clearly too little, too late, judging by the protests still underway.

This is not the first trade agreement being negotiated by the EU, but it is the largest: Compare this to the agreement just reached with Vietnam or Canada, for example. Its ambitious scope is perhaps what has made it a target but those involved in the talks – including the rapporteur for the European Parliament’s trade committee, Bernd Lange – believe it would be foolish to settle for a “TTIP Lite”, even if that means going over the proposed end-2016 deadline.

The deadline is not arbitrary: it coincides with the end of President Barack Obama’s term, and while Clinton’s team withdrew its support for the agreement, it might be swayed. The Trump team has made it clear that it is not keen on trade deals. Full stop.

In spite of the protests, the EU and US teams, led by chief negotiators Ignacio Garcia Bercero and Dan Mullaney respectively, carried on with the 14th round of talks last week. Over the past rounds, the negotiations have gone step by step, narrowing in from broad concepts to identifying the regulatory, technical and legal requirements of each aspect, to involving the stakeholders in each. Now, there is at last a consolidated text taking shape, albeit with several as yet unresolved sticking points included in brackets. Clearly all the low-hanging fruit has already been picked so the remaining talks will involve the sectors which most impact and most controversy, from selling American-made Parmesan, to public procurement contracts.

But there has been progress. One of the major points brought up by protesters has been the dispute mechanism, which the European Parliament committee made clear would not have been acceptable in its original form. Now the EU has put forward a completely revised version based on an ‘investment court’ which was described by the EP committee’s shadow rapporteur Marietje Schaake as being so good that it should be applied to the hundreds of other trade agreements now in force in the EU. But the US disagrees with many of its points, preferring arbiters to judges, and seeing the opportunity to appeal as being, bluntly speaking, a waste of time.

The protesters will no doubt be out in force again for the next round – which will be scheduled after a ministerial meeting in Bratislava in September – but inside the Commission offices, the midnight oil will be burning through the summer as negotiators plough through the reams of paper to come up with solutions which will be politically acceptable to as many stakeholders as possible. As far as they are concerned, TTIP is far from “killed” and certainly no “game”.