New Brexit deal must survive Parliament
BRUSSELS — Britain and the European Union agreed on a Brexit deal Thursday, setting the stage for a fateful showdown in the British Parliament, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson faces an uphill struggle to marshal enough votes for his plan after three years of anguished, politically corrosive debate.
However, Johnson, who has yet to win a vote in Parliament as prime minister, may already be thinking beyond whether lawmakers approve this deal. Even if he loses, analysts say, he is likely to call for a general election in the coming weeks, hoping to win a mandate to do what Britain’s paralyzed political class has so far been unwilling to do: pull Britain out of the EU as swiftly as possible.
With Britain’s opposition Labour Party determined to reject the agreement and defeat Johnson at the polls, and with others hoping to force a second referendum that could reverse Brexit altogether, it all suggests a recipe for continued political upheaval.
The deal ran into political headwinds almost immediately, when Northern Ireland’s influential Democratic Unionist Party refused to support it, saying it would cleave Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom and hurt its economy. The party’s rebellion deprived Johnson of his most obvious path to a majority.
Johnson, who called a special session of Parliament for Saturday, appears to be betting he can cobble together enough votes from other lawmakers who are fed up with the endless wrangling over Brexit and may view this deal, however imperfect, as better than any alternative.
It is a breathtaking gamble by a buccaneering leader who has already upended Britain’s political establishment in his quest to take Britain out of the EU — shutting down Parliament for several weeks, purging rebels in his Conservative Party and drawing a rare rebuke from Britain’s Supreme Court.
Johnson’s predecessor as prime minister, Theresa May, made a similar bet by calling an early election in 2017. She fared poorly and ended up in a minority government propped up by the Democratic Unionists, severely limiting her room to maneuver on Brexit.
But on Thursday, Johnson basked in the approval of the 27 other EU leaders, who gathered in Brussels for a two-day summit to endorse the deal. That was less surprising than it seemed, given the significant concessions that Britain made in days of frantic negotiations, mainly over how to treat Northern Ireland.
“This deal represents a very good deal both for the EU and for the U.K,” Johnson said. “And it’s a reasonable, fair outcome.”
‘I’m happy about the deal, but I’m sad about Brexit,” said the president of the European Commission, Jean-claude Juncker, appearing alongside Johnson at a news conference.
Under the terms of the agreement, Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, would leave the EU’S single market and join a separate customs union with Britain. But it would remain closely aligned with a maze of European rules and regulations, allowing seamless trading to continue with Ireland, a member of the EU.
The deal Johnson struck is not radically different from a proposal Europe first made to Britain in early 2018, leaving Northern Ireland alone in the bloc’s customs union. May rejected that proposal, saying it threatened the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom and that “no U.K. prime minister could ever agree to it.”
In fact, Johnson’s deal is at the extreme end of possible divorce settlements between Britain and the EU, with no promise of alignment between the two sides in commerce and trade, with the exception of Northern Ireland.