Two
Belgians and a Frenchman walk into Brexit…
European
Parliament chooses Belgium’s former prime minister as its envoy in
UK exit talks.
By QUENTIN ARIÈS
and PAUL DALLISON 9/8/16, 7:43 PM CET
European Parliament
leaders on Thursday chose outspoken Belgian MEP Guy Verhofstadt to be
the assembly’s chief negotiator on Brexit, a move that seemed
designed by Brussels to provoke the Brits (again) before the talks
even get underway.
A three-time Belgian
prime minister who now leads the centrist Liberal bloc in the
European Parliament, Verhofstadt is known for his excitable speaking
style and media savvy. Throughout the Brexit debate he has often been
harshly critical of the U.K. government, for example by declaring
after the U.K.’s vote to leave the union that “the British must
not hold the EU to ransom” by delaying the official start of
divorce proceedings.
Verhofstadt also has
spoken out frequently on issues that are sure to be contentious
during the negotiations, insisting in July that Britain should not be
allowed to restrict immigration and retain access to the other
aspects of the single market.
“The European
Parliament will never agree to a deal that de facto ends the free
movement of people for a decade, while giving away an extra rebate in
exchange for all the advantages of the internal market,” he said.
“What would stop other countries from asking the same exceptional
status?”
Although it has no
formal role in the exit negotiations themselves, the Parliament will
have to approve the agreement on the conditions for the U.K.’s
departure from the EU. By selecting the combative Verhofstadt, the
Parliament is helping stack the deck against London in the coming
negotiations, a little over a month after the Commission chose Michel
Barnier, a former European commissioner and veteran of tussles with
the City of London — and, worse, a Frenchman — as its Brexit
point man.
Barnier’s
appointment was itself a response from the Commission to a move by
another EU institution, the Council of Ministers, which on the day
after the U.K. referendum named Belgian diplomat Didier Seeuws as its
lead Brexit negotiator.
Reaction to
Verhofstadt’s appointment was swift, especially from British MEPs
who saw it as a provocation.
“Guy
Verhofstadt hates everything we stand for, which should mean a much
shorter renegotiation” — Nigel Farage
“Guy Verhofstadt
hates everything we stand for, which should mean a much shorter
renegotiation,” said Brexit architect and United Kingdom
Independence Party MEP Nigel Farage, a frequent sparring partner with
the Belgian in parliamentary debates. “Mr. Verhofstadt is a
fanatical supporter of EU federalism even by the standards of the
European Parliament. This appointment will no doubt speed up the
U.K.’s exit from the European Union.”
Syed Kamall, the
British Tory MEP who heads the European Conservatives and Reformists
group, said the appointment was “a stitch-up.”
“It is not right
that the president and a couple of men sitting in a back room can
decide everything and foist it on the democratically elected
representatives,” Kamall said. “If the Parliament thinks that Guy
Verhofstadt is the right person to represent it in the negotiations
then that’s fair enough, but these backroom stitch-ups are
disrespectful of the 747 other MEPs and their voters.”
That was nothing
compared to the comments from the right-leaning British media that
greeted Barnier’s appointment in July.
The Sun’s
political editor, Tom Newton Dunn, tweeted “hard to think of a more
anti-British figure, declaration of war.” That sentiment was echoed
by Tom Shipman of the Sunday Times, who tweeted “appointing Michel
Barnier, one of the least popular ex-commissioners in London, as
point man for Brexit is an act of war by Juncker.”
The Daily Express
leaned on the caps-lock button as it wrote about the “Most
DANGEROUS man in EU” and bemoaned that Commission President
Jean-Claude Juncker had hired a “French FEDERALIST to negotiate on
Brexit.”
But Vincenzo
Scarpetta, of the think-tank Open Europe, wrote in a blog post that
Verhofstadt’s role would be less critical than the one given to
Barnier.
“On a personal
level Verhofstadt could be a pretty tough nut to crack,” Scarpetta
wrote. “A diehard European federalist, he generally comes across as
less pragmatic than Barnier. I would expect Verhofstadt to be
particularly intransigent when it comes to splitting the EU’s
so-called ‘four freedoms’ — that is the free movement of goods,
services, capital and people.”
What Verhostadt’s
role will be is not yet clear. The Parliament’s Constitutional
Affairs Committee will take the lead for the assembly on Brexit and
most likely will set up a special taskforce on the talks, which
Verhofstadt would chair.
During David
Cameron’s renegotiation deal with the EU — which he hoped would
be enough to convince Brits to vote in favor of staying in the bloc —
Verhostadt was one of a trio of veteran MEPs, alongside Germany’s
Elmar Brok and Italy’s Roberto Gualtieri, named to represent the
Parliament.
Parliamentary
sources said Verhofstadt’s appointment shows the assembly is trying
to exert greater influence over the negotiations.
“This
appointment was made out of the blue, we got the news after the
meeting by the secretariat-general [of the European Parliament],”
said a source.
Choosing such a big
name is also a way of joining the inter-institutional battle over
Brexit. When the Council chose Seeuws as its lead Brexit negotiator,
it caught everyone — especially the Commission — by surprise. The
reaction from across the street in the Commission was to pick
Barnier, even though he so far has nothing to do as official Brexit
talks haven’t started.
As one diplomat put
it over the summer, “Nobody in either the Council or in the
Commission knows how we will work on Brexit.”
Seeuws’s boss,
European Council President Donald Tusk, told British Prime Minister
Theresa May on Thursday that talks on the U.K.’s exit from the
European Union should start as soon as possible — which has been
the EU line since the day after the vote.
By appointing
Barnier, who will start work in October, Juncker (or more likely his
powerful chief of staff Martin Selmayr) has chosen a man who has
overseen much of the uneasy and at times tense dialogue between the
eurozone and the U.K., during his years as commissioner in charge of
the single market from 2010 to 2014.
During his second
stint in Brussels — he was also a member of the Commission headed
by Romano Prodi between 1999 and 2004 — Barnier’s main
achievement may well have been to convince London financiers, in
spite of their initial reservations, that a Frenchman was not
necessarily out to get them with hostile, burdensome regulation in
the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
On Wednesday,
speaking publicly for the first time since his appointment to the
Brexit post, Barnier sounded even more reassuring, saying it would be
important to keep a good relationship between the EU and Britain.
“I think we are in
it with the U.K. for the long term in terms of the stability of this
continent,” he said.
There’s another
factor that may be at play in the Verhofstadt appointment, according
to some in the Parliament: that giving him such a powerful role is a
move by Martin Schulz, the president of the assembly, to stay for a
third-term after his mandate ends in January.
“They are helping
each other,” said a center-left parliamentary source. “Verhofstadt
just secured public and media attention for at least the next three
years.”
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