German political leaders cannot claim to want an EU-U.S. free trade deal while constantly warning of its risks, EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht said. The public debate in Europe's largest exporter has been firmly against a free trade deal between Brussels and Washington called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), with concerns ranging from health and safety to spying. Germany's Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel, whose responsibilities include trade, has said the planned trade deal is not perfect and opposes the inclusion in trade deals of provisions to protect investors. De Gucht, a Belgian politician whose term at the Commission ends this month, said a lot of the criticism was misinformed and that some critics were describing aspects of the proposed accord as if was a "monster coming out of the waters" "The impact is overwhelming. You are making people afraid of this. If you want to convince people, you have to do some convincing," he told an audience of the EU offices of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Brussels. The German government, a 'grand coalition' of Gabriel's Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats of Chancellor Angela Merkel officially want an EU-U.S. free trade deal. "If the Grand Coalition wants TTIP, they will have to support it, not always criticize it," De Gucht said. Much of the criticism has focused on the trade pact's Investor-State Dispute Settlement clause allowing companies to take cross-border legal action against governments. Critics say it gives multinationals too much power and could undermine laws on labor, the environment or food standards. The European Commission argues that EU member states, including Germany, already have some 1,400 bilateral investment agreements with other countries, including the United States, and that virtually all of them include ISDS clauses. Germany can claim to be the inventor of such investment protection, signing the world's first bilateral investment treaty with Pakistan in 1959 and currently having over 100 such deals. (Reuters)