U.K. election adds fresh elements of uncertainty to ‘Brexit’
Likely delay in negotiations frustrates other EU leaders
LONDON — What a mess. Britain was supposed to wake up Friday with the political clarity, finally, to begin formal negotiations to leave the European Union, a process scheduled to start in 10 days.
Instead, Britain is staring at a hung Parliament and a deeply damaged Prime Minister Theresa May, her authority and credibility fractured by her failure to maintain her Conservative Party’s majority in Parliament.
Ignoring demands that she resign, the prime minister said Friday that she would cling to power by forming a minority government with the support of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland.
Because the Conservatives won the most seats and the most votes, May gets the first chance to form a new government, despite winning only 318 seats, 12 fewer than in 2015, and short of a formal majority of 326 in the 650-seat House of Commons. The Democratic Unionists won 10.
But minority governments tend to be fragile and short-lived, and many expect that May will be a lame-duck prime minister, that she may not last as long as a year and that she will not lead her party into another election.
For EU leaders, who were expecting her to emerge with a reinforced majority, the uncertainty is unwelcome, especially
as they try to prioritize issues such as climate change and their relationship with an unpredictable and unfriendly President Donald Trump. There is also resentment that, once again, the British have complicated things out of political hubris and partisan self-interest.
May called the snap election three years early — and her decision backfired. So did the decision by her predecessor, David Cameron, to call the referendum on EU membership in the first place.
“I thought surrealism was a Belgian invention,” said Guy Verhofstadt, a former prime minister of Belgium who is the European Parliament’s chief coordinator on Britain’s exit from the bloc. “Yet another own goal: after Cameron, now May.”
Without question now, Britain is not ready for the negotiations, having spent the past year largely avoiding a real debate on the topic, other than a vague argument over the merits of a “hard ‘Brexit’ ” (as a clean break from the European Union is known), versus a “soft ‘Brexit,’ ” which would require more compromise.
Brussels, by contrast, has a negotiating team led by a former European commissioner, Michel Barnier, and it has published detailed negotiating guidelines, agreed upon by the bloc’s 27 other member states. While Britain seems more divided, the European Union appears to have achieved unusual unity.
And the Brexit clock is ticking. On Friday morning, the president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, warned that London faced a firm deadline to complete talks — March 2019 — and that any delay raised the risk of failing to reach a deal.
“We don’t know when Brexit talks start. We know when they must end,” Tusk wrote on Twitter. “Do your best to avoid a ‘no deal’ as result of ‘no negotiations.’ ”
Labour, under Jeremy Corbyn, ran what political analysts regard as an excellent and optimistic campaign, promising an end to austerity, more money for health and social welfare and free tuition. Labour gained 29 seats to reach 261, with one seat left to decide. But that would still leave it far short of a majority, even in combination with other sympathetic parties, especially since the Scottish National Party lost 21 of its 56 seats, a serious blow to its goal of Scotland’s independence.
Only a year ago, the vote on EU membership had seemingly divided the country along clear lines between “Leave” and “Remain.” The vote on Thursday erased such clarity, delivering mixed messages, even as Britain remained deeply split — by region, class and generation.
May’s Conservative Party lost its majority but still won the most seats, doing particularly well in constituencies that backed withdrawal from the European Union, while the revitalized Labour Party did better in urban seats that were opposed to leaving the bloc.
“After this election, there’s no mandate for the hard Brexit the prime minister put forward — but there’s no mandate to abandon Brexit either,” said Peter Ricketts, a former ambassador to France and now an independent member of the House of Lords, Britain’s upper chamber. “With no majority in Parliament, the government’s negotiating position just got weaker.”
May’s challenge will be to form a coherent Brexit position that can command support from a much more diverse set of legislators, said Gus O’Donnell, a former Cabinet secretary and member of the House of Lords.
He noted that the Democratic Unionists will have their own interests about a post-Brexit relationship with Ireland, including border and customs regulations. Conservative legislators from Scotland, on whom May will also depend, will urge her to try to retain access to the single market of the European Union, which May previously rejected.
“Remember, she’s still got lots of hardline Brexiters in her own party who don’t want to stay in the single market, want to move away from the European Court of Justice and don’t want to pay any money to the EU,” O’Donnell said. “She’s got to try to bring all that together.”
Eric Pickles, a former chairman of the Conservative Party, said that while May was likely to stay on as prime minister, the government’s negotiating strategy might have to be refined.
“I think we now have to build a grand coalition of support,” he said. “I don’t see how realistic it is not to be leaving the single market and the customs union — but there is leaving and leaving, and it is going to be up to negotiations.”
The Democratic Unionists are the harder-line, mainly Protestant party in Northern Ireland and support Brexit. And they are particularly committed to keeping Corbyn out of power because of his history of sympathy with Irish Republicans, including Sinn Fein, which was the political wing of the Irish Republican Army.
Arlene Foster, leader of the DUP, said that she had spoken to May, “but I think it is too soon to talk about what we’re going to do.” She said she would explore with May “how we can help bring stability to our nation.”
But earlier Friday, Foster was not optimistic about the tenure of May, saying: “It will be difficult for her to survive given that she was presumed at the start of the campaign, which seems an awfully long time ago, to come back with maybe a hundred, maybe more, in terms of her majority.”
May is certain to face demands from lawmakers in her own party that she change her leadership style and consult more widely. Nigel Evans, a senior Conservative lawmaker, blamed the party’s manifesto, which had been prepared by a small group and hit traditional Tory supporters. “We didn’t shoot ourselves in the foot, we shot ourselves in the head,” he told the BBC.
For the past year, the debate about the exit from the European Union in Britain has been limited to vague promises of repatriating British funds from the European budget, controlling immigration and negotiating a favorable trade deal. Britons have heard little about the cost of leaving the world’s biggest free-trade bloc — not least the tens of billions of pounds owed to Brussels for existing liabilities such as pension obligations and investment commitments in the current EU budget.
“The British public have not at all been prepared for having to pay a large check to Brussels to settle our debts in this divorce,” Ricketts said.
May told voters that she wanted to start negotiating a trade deal immediately — something categorically ruled out by the 27 countries on the other side of the table. They want to talk about a divorce settlement first: about the rights of EU citizens in Britain, and of Britons in Europe (doable, officials say); about the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which remains a member of the bloc (trickier — especially if the Northern Irish unionists are king makers); and about the most contentious issue in any divorce: the money.
Only when “sufficient progress” has been made on these issues, the European Union says, can the talks move on toward a framework for a future trade deal and to designing a transitional agreement that would bridge the end of British membership in the bloc — March 2019 — until a final deal is ratified by the other 27 states.