And so it begins. EU negotiator Michel Barnier needed no more than three words to announce the start of Brexit talks with the UK: “We are starting”, he wrote on Twitter.
Everything else – at least on the EU side – has already been said.
The EU has put five official documents on the table, from negotiating guidelines to directives to position papers, outlining its demands on citizens, the budget and Ireland. EU leaders are to sign off a set of criteria for the relocation of the EU’s London-based medicines and banking agencies at a summit on Thursday.
The talks will get going at 11am on Monday morning and will last until around 6pm, with Barnier and his deputy, Sabine Weyand, in charge on the EU side, and David Davis, the UK’s Brexit minister, and Olly Robbins, Theresa May’s EU adviser and permanent secretary at Davis’s Department for Exiting the EU, on the British side.
The talks will be held in the Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters, in both English and French.
Officials from the Commission’s Brexit task force may be brought into the talks on specific issues, and will also break off into “working groups” (subject areas to be confirmed) in the afternoon.
Barnier will brief EU leaders on the outcome of the talks at the Brussels summit.
What the UK wants
But just two days before the start of talks, EU officials are still in the dark about what the UK wants, having to go off months-old and sometimes vague statements and documents.
Back in January, Theresa May said that she wanted out of the single market, no more “huge sums” for Brussels, curbs on EU migrants and an end to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. She was less clear about whether the UK would leave the customs union, saying she wanted tariff-free access to EU markets but the power to negotiate her own trade deals – positions which are incompatible for customs union members.
Those demands were echoed in a white paper published shortly afterwards (see EUROPE 11717), and in her March letter triggering the UK’s exit under Article 50 of the EU treaty (see EUROPE 11757).
However, following last week’s UK elections, her position has been considerably weakened (see EUROPE 11805). With no absolute majority in parliament, she is seeking the support of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, a hardline Protestant party that is in favour of Brexit, but likely a softer one than May had in mind.
“I don’t know what hard Brexit or soft Brexit mean”, EU negotiator Michel Barnier told the Financial Times and a group of European newspapers last week. “Brexit is the withdrawal from the EU – it is the UK that decided that. We’re implementing it”, he said, adding that “all options are available and on the table”, “including that of a no deal”.
The UK is reported to be preparing a “generous” offer on citizens’ rights to get the talks off to a positive start. But Barnier was non-plussed when this was put to him in the newspaper interview, saying: “I don’t know if it’s generous to preserve the rights of people and their families who are worried”.
“Open door”
In a strange twist to the tale, German, French and EU politicians have begun to float the idea of the UK reversing course and stopping Brexit. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble told Bloomberg News that if the British wanted to change their minds, “they would find open doors”. His comments were echoed by French President Emmanuel Macron, who said, after a meeting with May in Paris, that “the door is obviously still open”.
The European Parliament’s chief negotiator, Guy Verhofstadt, warned that, while the door would remain open, it would be “a brand new door, to a new Europe without complexity, with real powers”.
Article 50 says nothing about stopping the clock on Brexit talks, but does say that countries wanting to rejoin the bloc “shall be subject to the procedure” set out in the EU treaty – that is, the unanimous approval of all EU countries, once all membership conditions are met.