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BRUSSELS: British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Wednesday that “now is the time” to make a Brexit deal happen, as she arrived for a summit with EU leaders hoping to unblock stalled divorce talks.
Hours before the summit, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel said there was “still a chance” for an accord but issued a stern warning that Europe must be prepared for a no-deal Brexit.
Negotiations are at an impasse over the issue of a legal backstop to keep open the border between British Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, an EU member.
May faces a battle to find a solution that is acceptable to both the EU and hard-line Brexit supporters in her own deeply-divided party, but she insisted that a deal is achievable and that “now is the time to make it happen”.
“I believe everybody around the table wants to get a deal. By working intensively and closely we can achieve that deal,” she told reporters as she arrived for the summit.
European Council President Donald Tusk set a low bar for expectations on the eve of the summit, saying he had “no grounds for optimism” but urging May to offer new “concrete ideas on how to break the impasse”.
Neither side has shown much sign of flexibility, but EU negotiator Michel Barnier is willing to add a year to the 21-month post Brexit transition period — taking it to the end of 2021, two diplomats said on condition of anonymity.
“The aim is to gain more time to negotiate the agreement on the future relationship and thus further reduce the probability of having to resort to the backstop,” one of the diplomats said.
Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney told the BBC that Barnier is proposing an extension, but did not say for how long.
After one-on-one meetings with Tusk, European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker and Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, May will brief her 27 European colleagues before leaving the EU leaders to discuss Brexit over dinner without her.
Tusk has made it clear that if May and Barnier do not signal concrete progress towards a draft deal he will not call a November summit to sign it.
Instead, the matter could either be pushed back to December or — more dramatically — the EU could use the November weekend to meet on preparations for a “no-deal” Brexit.
Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2018
