How EU leaders are torn over Britain’s Brexit deal

Humiliation; party splits; a long recession; ridicule... the pressures on Boris Johnson to achieve a trade deal with the EU are very well known. Perhaps the only detail still missing is what his fiancee Carrie Symonds will say about the new fishing quotas and the role of the European Court of Justice. No doubt it will be leaked in due course.  

Yet while Brexit isn’t obsessing most of Europe in the way it has preoccupied Britain, there are still jobs and national pride at stake, and European leaders face their own domestic Brexit-related challenges.  

Thus far only President Macron has allowed talk of a national veto being applied to any Frost-Barnier accord. Maybe it is just for show and to demonstrate how hard he is fighting for les pecheurs (his government has privately advised the French fishing industry to brace itself for change); but a “non” to British ambitions has been used before, albeit in the other direction. General de Gaulle twice refused British membership, in 1961 and 1967, and when Britain finally signed up in 1972, the French people (not the British) had a referendum on the enlargement of the European Community.  

As it happens, France has few allies now for such a radical move, even though Macron fancies himself as a latter day Gaullist, and it is inconceivable in reality that 2,500 or so French fishing jobs would prevent a deal. Well, you’d assume so, but Macron is not especially popular, his En Marche! party is split and French society faces great tensions. All add to instability and political risks.  

Unlike the 1960s, though, Germany has a more assertive political attitude to the EU, and is even more industrially dominant in the 27-member grouping than were the six that signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957. It will not permit the French to sabotage a deal on narrowly chauvinistic grounds. Where Angela Merkel and Macron agree is on the inviolability of the sacred single market. That Franco-German alliance of leaders seems impervious to any public opinion running in the opposite direction. As a final act of European statesmanship before she retires, Merkel will maintain the EU as an article of faith in modern German politics. She will not need to face the electorate again. Contrary to some British predictions, the German business community, which enjoys a lucrative export trade in the UK, has not sought to interfere in politics and campaign to pressure her into offering the British concessions. (Another mutual misunderstanding of political and cultural norms that has undermined the negotiations.) All of Germany’s mainstream parties are committed to European integration for historical as much as economic reasons, even if the citizenry can be more sceptical. It is the Chancellery in Berlin that is the most adamantly hostile in its attitude to Brexit, something the British seem too often to forget, impressed as they are by German cars, beer and Jurgen Klopp.

The Danes, Dutch and Belgians all have a similar interest in the health of their fishing communities, and, like the French, in the wider food and drink trade, the ports and manufacturing, and together the North Sea bloc is coming under domestic pressure especially from coastal communities for a deal that doesn’t “sell them out”. No deal, meaning tariffs and no guaranteed access to fishing grounds or UK supermarket shelves, would be the worst deal of all. As in France, they have a lot to lose, and want their leaders to push for the best possible terms, but not, presumably, risking a collapse of the talks.  

Brexit in reality is a lose-lose proposition for both sides, in the short term at least. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Ireland, a small nation but with the most to lose from Brexit in whatever form it eventually takes. The threat to the Good Friday Agreement and peace in Northern Ireland is plain, and now exacerbated by the British government’s willingness to abrogate unilaterally parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol in the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement. Given the intimate economic links north and south of the border, and the fact that much of Ireland’s goods exports and imports from the continent have to travel through Britain, the issue is, if anything, more vital to Ireland than Britain. The hit to Ireland’s national income from no deal would be proportionately the biggest in the EU and larger than the UK.  

So Ireland’s coalition co-premiers, Micheal Martin (Fianna Fail) and Leo Varadkar (Fine Gael) also have a vested interest, but one at variance with, say, Germany, because basically Ireland needs a deal at almost any cost. The good news though for Dublin is the leverage it enjoys in Washington as well as in Brussels and Belfast. For one of the most important players in the UK-EU talks now is President-elect Joe Biden, who has made clear his views on Brexit. He too has domestic pressures to ensure a deal that meets with Irish approval. Failing to agree a deal with Brussels, and by extension Dublin, means the British will indeed be isolated diplomatically for the foreseeable future. Just as that adds to difficulties in London it eases problems in Ireland. The one thing the leaders of the two established parties will wish to avoid is having Sinn Fein, north and south of the border, accusing them of having sold out to the British.  

Other EU states, often overlooked in the debates, also have skin in the game, with Spain, Portugal and Italy badly exposed to losses of export markets and British tourism – at a time when Covid has already ravaged their economies. In eastern Europe there are plenty of jobs in car factories in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania that partly depend on a healthy UK market. They and other countries also have sizeable expat communities living in the UK. Lithuania, for example, has about 200,000 citizens in Britain, representing fully 7 per cent of its population. Their interests should be protected by the relevant parts of the UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement. This would also be true of the substantial British population in Spain, and part-time residents in holiday homes in France, Italy and elsewhere. Yet their way of life might still be affected by a failure in the current talks. Who they blame – the EU, the British or their respective national governments – could also have a domestic political impact.  

The old cliche that both sides (28 sides, in fact) have so much to lose that there’s bound to be a deal has some force, in reality, the more you look around the domestic national-level politics in each country. They are all democracies, after all, and each country and every regional assembly has a say, indeed a veto, on the deal. Some communities will be heavily dependent on British custom, such as the Ford Focus factory in Saarlouis, Germany, or the resorts in Greece most popular with UK visitors. Who can say how the voters will react if Brexit goes the wrong way for them? Or if some wrangling about farm subsidies or some unrelated matter would lead the Walloons of Belgium to scupper things (as they did with the EU-Canada deal)? Or, more likely, try to wrest some last-minute concessions? All politics is local, as they say.