Tory election victory focuses EU minds on British membership
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Version 0 of 1. Europe awoke on Friday to David Cameron’s second term and a stunned awareness that Britain’s future in the EU is up for grabs as never before. The Conservative triumph, unforeseen in Brussels and other European capitals, concentrated minds and instantly generated invitations and overtures for Cameron over negotiations on a new UK deal in Europe. The worried offers, however, may not survive the nitty gritty of the gruelling negotiations certain to follow. Cameron needs to stage his epochal in/out referendum on the EU by 2017, the same year Germany elects a new chancellor and France a new president – a highly volatile political mix with variable and uncertain outcomes. The French president, François Hollande, on the centre-left and no ally of Cameron, graciously congratulated the prime minister, stressed UK-French “partnership in strengthening the EU” and invited the Tory leader to Paris “once he has formed a government”. Donald Tusk, the president of the European council who mediates between EU national leaders and will have to handle the UK negotiations, emphasised Britain’s key role in the EU as the champion of a “common-sense agenda”. “I count on the new British government making the case for the United Kingdom’s continued membership of the European Union. In that, I stand ready to help,” he said. “I am deeply convinced that there is no better life outside the European Union, for any country. A better EU is in the interest not only of Britain but of every member state.” Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European commission and the target of a vicious campaign by Cameron last summer, also sounded magnanimous. “I stand ready to work with you to strike a fair deal for the United Kingdom in the EU and look forward to your ideas and proposals in this regard,” Junker told Cameron, congratulating him on his “resounding victory”. After 18 months of shadow-boxing and what senior diplomats in Brussels call the “phony war” over Cameron’s EU referendum gamble, the sense there and across Europe is that the British question has suddenly moved to the fore. The EU is currently wrestling with the crisis in Athens and whether Greece will have to leave the euro. The issue of a British exit suddenly looms larger, especially in Germany. Der Spiegel described the Tory victory as “bad news for Europe”, but predicted Cameron would be a weak second-term prime minister held to ransom on Europe by his own Europhobic backbenchers. “Cameron will be even more susceptible to blackmail from within his own party than he has been in the last five years,” the paper said. The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung took the opposite tack. “The European partners can be sure that Cameron will come into these negotiations with renewed self-confidence. He will demand concessions,” it said. “What will the German chancellor, who wants to keep Britain in the EU, offer him? How far will she go to meet him?” The pressure is also now on Cameron to finally come clean on what he expects the Europeans to concede in order for him to be able to sell a deal at home that would keep Britain in the EU. “The ball is very much in the UK court now,” said a senior EU official. “It’s up to the British to define what they want.” Cameron will have his first opportunity to sound out fellow EU leaders in two weeks’ time when a special EU summit is held in Latvia. But the expectation in EU capitals is that the prime minister will unfold his shopping list at a Brussels summit on 21 June. “He will set out his strategy and demands for the referendum negotiations,” said a second senior EU official. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who fervently wants to keep the UK in the EU but is unwilling to make major concessions to facilitate that, will be central to the negotiations. The Obama administration has also restated its preference for the UK to remain a strong EU member. “The UK’s relationship with the EU is first and foremost a question for the British people and the British government, not for us,” the deputy secretary of state, Antony Blinken, told the Guardian during a telephone briefing. But he added: “From our perspective, and we’ve said this on a number of occasions, we value a strong UK voice in the EU. The EU, for us, is a critical partner on global issues as well on European issues and transatlantic issues, and we very much welcome an outward-looking EU with the UK in it. We benefit when the EU is unified, speaking with a single voice, focused on our shared interests around the world and in Europe.” While Berlin and Paris have dissimilar views on and relationships with Britain in Europe, Merkel and Hollande will seek to strike a common Franco-German position on what concessions might be made to Cameron and where the limits lie. A German red line is any undermining of the freedom of movement for labour across the EU, which Cameron has challenged in his attempt to suppress immigration to Britain. A French red line is the reopening of EU treaties to grant Britain even more special treatment than it already enjoys in the union. A treaty renegotiation could trigger a referendum in France where Marine le Pen’s anti-EU Front National is riding high. This is a no-go area for Paris. On Monday, EU finance ministers are to discuss plans for greater integration of the single-currency zone, the issue that Cameron argues could supply the window of opportunity for renegotiating the Lisbon Treaty and rewriting the terms of British membership. A senior EU official made plain this had been considered and ruled out. A majority of EU governments had decided this would be counter-productive, he said on Friday. “It will not happen.” But EU leaders are signalling strongly that, in an attempt to woo Cameron, they would be willing to tinker with “secondary legislation” governing the social security and welfare benefits available to EU citizens migrating from their own country to another EU state. “There’s some leeway still to grant some minor concessions, but I think the German government has made quite clear what the red lines are and to what extent they will concede to the UK,” said Julian Rappold, of the German Council on Foreign Relations. “Merkel has clear limits about what she is willing to put on the table.” Scepticism about Cameron’s ability to secure a deal from the other EU states that he could then sell as a breakthrough to his own backbenchers and the anti-European rightwing media in Britain was echoed by the Eurasia Group risk consultancy. “Cameron’s ability to deliver on these concessions will be constrained by political dynamics in other EU capitals,” it said. “Cameron is going to find himself squeezed between the impossibility of his party’s demands and the serious limitations imposed upon him by the rest of Europe.” Additional reporting by Julian Borger |