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E.U. Leaders Push for a Speedy Start to Britain’s Exit Tough Choices and Hard Lessons for E.U. After ‘Brexit’ Vote
(about 5 hours later)
LONDON — European politicians on Sunday pressed Britain to begin the formal process of leaving the European Union, while new rifts emerged in the nation’s politics, underscoring a sense of drift on all sides after the shock of last week’s referendum. LONDON — The crisis ritual that will play out this week in Europe is all too familiar: Markets will gyrate. National leaders will huddle. A summit meeting in Brussels will extend deep into the night.
The departure of Britain will increase the prominence of Germany, already Europe’s most prosperous and populous country, and put pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel to navigate a peaceful split. Until now, these tense moments have typically been resolved with vague statements of unity, awkward compromises and a determination to muddle through without any fundamental change in direction — until the next crisis comes along.
The four largest political groups in the European Parliament are planning a motion to urge Britain to leave as quickly as possible and “avoid damaging delay,” according to deputies cited in the Sunday edition of The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The parliament’s president, Martin Schulz of Germany, appealed in his country’s largest-circulation newspaper, Bild, for swift negotiation of Britain’s departure. But Britain’s vote to leave the European Union leaves the Continent’s leaders facing difficult choices that may not be so easily kicked down the road or papered over.
That echoed the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, who on Saturday called for immediate negotiations. “They can’t pretend nothing happened,” said Franco Pavoncello, a political analyst in Rome. “If they do that, the risk of further breakup and even disintegration of the euro might increase.”
“It doesn’t make any sense to wait until October to try and negotiate the terms of their departure,” he said of the British, whose prime minister, David Cameron, said on Friday that he would resign and leave all negotiations to his successor, who would be chosen by October. As Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President François Hollande of France and Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of Italy meet on Monday in Berlin, and again with the heads of all 28 European Union members in Brussels on Tuesday and Wednesday, they will have to decide whether to continue pressing for immediate negotiations on the terms of Britain’s withdrawal or to let passions cool in the hopes that some kind of deal might be worked out to keep Britain in the bloc.
The jockeying for prominence in Britain will play out in coming weeks among Mr. Cameron’s Conservatives, as well as in the opposition Labour Party and the U.K. Independence Party, which pushed for a British exit from the bloc. Already on Sunday, internal dissent within Labour led to the firing of its spokesman for foreign affairs and the resignation of the spokeswoman on health matters. They will have to decide whether the lesson to draw from the British vote is that the growing populist and nationalist backlash against the bloc needs to be acknowledged through fundamental changes or whether it requires a show of resolve by pushing ahead with plans for deeper integration.
Still, Ms. Merkel said on Saturday, “it shouldn’t take forever” for Britain to start the formal process of leaving. And they will confront the potential for a change in the power dynamic among the bloc’s biggest members, with Italy and to a degree France challenging the dominance of Germany and Germany’s insistence on austerity economics as the cornerstone of European policy.
“I would not fight over a short period of time,” Ms. Merkel told a news conference, adding that “there is no need to be particularly nasty in any way in the negotiations.” In an op-ed published Sunday in Italy’s leading business newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore, Mr. Renzi described the British vote as “an interesting opportunity to relaunch the European project.” He suggested that it was time for the bloc to focus on economic growth and job creation rather than debt reduction.
In keeping with Germans’ penchant for orderly process, she said that the important thing was that talks “must be conducted properly.” “It needs to take back its identity,” Mr. Renzi wrote of the European Union. Austerity policies have “transformed the future into a threat,” he said, adding, “They spurred fear.”
Ms. Merkel has scheduled meetings on Monday in Berlin, first with Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, and then over dinner with the leaders of France and Italy. On Tuesday, she will first address a special session of Parliament in Berlin and then go to Brussels for the first meeting of all European leaders since the British referendum. Europe will be working its way through all those issues as Ms. Merkel, Mr. Hollande and Mr. Renzi, among other leaders, face intense political problems at home, undercutting their influence and restricting their room to maneuver. Ms. Merkel and Mr. Hollande are facing general elections next year, and Mr. Renzi’s fate could hang on a referendum on a new government structure in Italy this fall.
Her foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, is also reaching out to his European counterparts, both in Western and Eastern Europe. On Saturday he hosted the foreign ministers of the European Union’s five other founding members — France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg — and will travel on Monday to Prague to meet his colleagues from four key former Soviet bloc members: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. National elections in Spain on Sunday were a timely symbol of Europe’s political shambles. The vote was the second in just six months after a December vote resulted in a political deadlock that left the country paralyzed in dealing with issues like rampant youth unemployment.
In more than a decade in power, Ms. Merkel has risen calmly to crises, whether over the euro currency or Russia’s grab for territory in Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014. “Brexit raises a question mark for the whole planet,” Mr. Hollande said during the weekend. Struggling with poll ratings of 15 percent, he took the unusual step of inviting his archrivals, the conservative former president Nicolas Sarkozy and the nationalist leader Marine Le Pen, to the Élysée Palace to discuss the way forward.
But there are few guidelines for how the Continent — and Britain, Europe’s second-biggest economy — should proceed in the unprecedented event of a country’s leaving the 28-member European Union. “This vote is a brutal shock — now the whole world fears a populist shock wave,” the French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, told the Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche. “We have to move quickly and show we understand the message of the people.”
“Merkel has basically taken an approach of ‘We shouldn’t rush,’ and is looking at things calmly — which is very much her style,” said Daniela Schwarzer, the director of the Europe program at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. Calls in France for a referendum on the European Union mounted from both the far right and the far left, echoing sentiment in many other countries.
By consulting with key European leaders before the summit meeting in Brussels on Tuesday or Wednesday, Ms. Schwarzer said, the chancellor is trying to mold a united and clear response to the stunning British vote. The prospect of spreading political chaos may bind the German, French and Italian leaders together when they meet in Berlin on Monday. There is talk of a Franco-German effort to breathe life into the Continent’s key relationship with some sort of joint project, perhaps in defense — a field where Britain also remains deeply bound into the Continent through its membership in NATO.
Ms. Merkel’s chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, said he had seen “absolutely no indication” of a swift negotiation with the British. Mr. Pavoncello suggested that a more likely vehicle for united European action is a restructuring of the European Union, centered on the founding members — Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands — with different levels of membership on the perimeters.
“I would rather tend to the view that this application will be made in the next weeks or months, possibly only by a new government,” Mr. Altmaier told the public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. It is not clear whether such actions would help build bridges among ordinary Europeans who feel alienated by globalization and leaders who often seem out of touch with the concerns of their citizens. At the moment, there is no apparent consensus on how to address the immediate issue of dealing with Britain.
European officials in Brussels and in the European Parliament pushed for quick negotiations on Britain’s exit, even as Ms. Merkel, Europe’s most powerful leader, said she saw no need to rush.
But Norbert Röttgen, a Merkel ally and the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the German Parliament, noted that not even the Germans could afford complacency, especially with elections coming by the fall of next year.
If there is a lesson from Britain’s vote, he said, it is that those who are pro-Europe need to make their case much more powerfully if they are to maintain popular support. “If we go on like this,” he said in an interview, “the erosion will continue.”
Opening up debate carries its own risks. The inclusion of Ms. Le Pen, whose far-right, anti-Europe National Front far outpolls Mr. Hollande’s governing Socialists, in the weekend meetings in Paris accorded her a changed status in France, Mr. Röttgen noted.
In France, Germany and Italy, populist forces have been gaining influence, challenging established parties and raising questions about the future direction of the European project. Mr. Renzi has already seen the populist Five Star Movement win the mayoralty in Rome, Italy’s capital, and in Turin.
Polls suggest his popularity is wearing thin. He has rammed through changes in labor law and public administration, and won concessions from Brussels on budget flexibility. But many voters sense no change. Mr. Renzi has said he will quit if he loses the October referendum.
That raises the possibility of his being out just weeks after Britain, where the mainstream political parties are in increasing disarray, chooses a successor to Prime Minister David Cameron, who has said he will resign by October.
Ms. Merkel, while secure politically for now, has endured powerful criticism in Germany for her decision to allow more than a million refugees from Syria and elsewhere into the country last year, highlighting the power of an issue that also drove the British vote to leave Europe. A far-right party, Alternative for Germany, has been making inroads in part in reaction to the influx of refugees.