LONDON — What a mess.
Britain
was supposed to wake up on 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 on Friday that she
would cling to power by forming a minority government with the support
of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland.
Mrs.
May insisted that since the Conservatives had won the most seats and
the most votes, she was entitled 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.
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But
minority governments tend to be fragile and short-lived, and many
expect that Mrs. 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
European Union 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 Trump. There is also
resentment that, once again, the British have complicated things out of
political hubris and partisan self-interest.
Mrs.
May called the snap election three years early — and her decision
backfired. So did decision by her predecessor, David Cameron, to call
the referendum on European Union 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,” Mr.
Tusk wrote on Twitter. “Do your best to avoid a ‘no deal’ as result of
‘no negotiations.’”
Interactive Graphic
How Britain Voted
Results and analysis from the British general election.
For
now, the scramble in London is over the shape of the government. Mrs.
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. The revitalized Labour Party did better in urban
seats that were opposed to leaving the bloc.
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 European Union 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.
Mrs.
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 Mrs. May
will also depend, will urge her to try to retain access to the single
market of the European Union, which Mrs. May previously rejected.
“Remember,
she’s still got lots of hard-line 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 E.U.,” Mr.
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
Mrs. 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 Mr. 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 D.U.P., said that she had spoken to Mrs. May,
“but I think it is too soon to talk about what we’re going to do.” She
said she would explore with Mrs. May “how we can help bring stability to
our nation.”
But
earlier Friday, Mrs. Foster was not optimistic about the tenure of Mrs.
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.”
Mrs.
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 European
Union 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,” said Peter
Ricketts, a former ambassador to France and now an independent lawmaker
in the House of Lords.
Mrs.
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 European Union 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); 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.
Even
before talks have started, the trust level is weak. A dinner Mrs. May
had with the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker,
was leaked in astonishing detail to a German newspaper by Mr. Juncker’s
team. The leaks were widely condemned by officials — but their content
was described as accurate.
Mrs.
May had described her vision of a post-Brexit Britain in much the same
way as she did to her country’s voters: prosperous, open to the world,
and closely intertwined with Europe’s single market — the status quo,
but without the open borders, the budget contributions and the oversight
of the European Court of Justice. “Let us make ‘Brexit’ a success,” she
said at the dinner.
The
next day, after a call from Mr. Juncker, Chancellor Angela Merkel of
Germany gave a speech in Parliament. “I have a feeling that a few
Britons are deluding themselves,” she said. “That, however, is a waste
of time.”
“There
is no desire to punish Britain,” said Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, a former
adviser to the German president and now director of the Berlin office
of the German Marshall Fund. But for the European Union to remain a
viable and attractive club, leaving it must come at a cost, he said.
“There has to be a difference between being in and being out.”
Since
taking over as prime minister last July, Mrs. May has talked
incessantly about the exit from the European Union, while saying very
little of substance. Repeating that “Brexit means Brexit” and that she
would “make a success of Brexit,” the prime minister presented herself
to voters as the person to get the best deal for Britain — but without
defining the deal.
The
Evening Standard, a London newspaper edited by a Conservative former
chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, published 10 questions a
month ago about the exit from the European Union, challenging the
government to answer them. Among them: How is the withdrawal going to
increase trade after leaving the biggest free-trading bloc in the world?
How is market access for London’s financial services industry going to
be secured? How is migration supposed to be cut to the tens of thousands
when no one can identify the businesses whose labor supply will be
restricted?
“Not
one of these questions has been even addressed, let alone answered, by
the main political parties in this election,” the newspaper wrote in an
editorial on the eve of the vote. “As a result, it provides no mandate
for the details of Brexit.”
In any case, officials say, the mandate matters less than the balance of power at the negotiating table in Brussels.
“We
have a weak hand of cards,” said one senior British official, who
requested anonymity to discuss the government’s position “The E.U.’s
hand is much stronger.”
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