May expects tough Brexit talks after EU leaders agreed stiff terms
LONDON (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Sunday divorce talks with the European Union would be difficult, responding to the tough stance taken by EU leaders over the upcoming Brexit negotiations.
“What this shows, and what some of the other comments we’ve seen coming from European leaders shows, is that there are going to be times when these negotiations are going to be tough,” May told the BBC a day after her EU peers agreed on demands they want met to avoid chaos when Britain leaves the bloc in 2019.
At Saturday’s Brussels summit of the 27 other EU states, EU chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker accused unnamed pro-Brexit figures of underestimating the complexity of the task and German Chancellor Angela Merkel repeated her concern that London still harbored “illusions” about negotiating a quick free-trade pact.
May, who has called an election for June 8 in the hope of strengthening her position, repeated her insistence that no deal would be better than a bad deal — a position many in Brussels view as bluff, arguing that the legal void that would dawn on March 30, 2019, would hurt Britain much more than the others.
But Juncker, quoted on Sunday by Germany’s FAS newspaper, highlighted growing fears that the two sides are talking past each other, raising a significant risk of negotiations collapsing.
“I’m leaving Downing Street 10 times more skeptical than I was before,” the Frankfurt paper quoted the European Commission president as saying after he and chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier met May in London over dinner on Wednesday.
Juncker had arrived hefting two weighty EU treaties — last year’s 1,600-page CETA free-trade pact with Canada and the 2012 EU accession of the bloc’s newest member, Croatia (population 4.2 million). They were props to convince May of the complexity of unwinding 46 years of EU membership and keeping trade open.
So alarmed was he at what he said on Saturday were British officials who “underestimate the technical difficulties” that he alerted Merkel, the EU’s main power broker, in an early morning call to Berlin on Thursday. She then used a speech in parliament to warn against British “illusions” that it could retain much of the benefits of EU membership after Brexit.
