Category Archives: European Union

Britain, European Union, Finance

Macron tells British PM that UK can ‘always’ change its mind on Brexit

FRENCH-BRITISH RELATIONS

French President Emmanuel Macron Receives British Prime Minister Theresa May At Elysee Palace

The summit in Paris was intended to set out a joint approach to tackling terrorism and online radicalisation.

The French President, Emmanuel Macron, has told Theresa May that the door is “always open” for the UK to change its mind about Brexit.

Emmanuel Macron appeared to hold out the prospect of allowing Britain to re-enter the EU as the pair held a joint news conference in the garden of the Elysee Palace in Paris.

Mr Macron said: “Of course the door remains open, always open, until the negotiations come to an end.”

But he stressed that “once the negotiations have started, we should be well aware that it will be more difficult to move backwards”.

Their first bilateral meeting had the uncomfortable backdrop of Mrs May – abroad for the first time since losing her majority – meeting the President following his recent comfortable election victory and on the brink of big gains for his party in parliament.

It comes as the UK’s Brexit strategy has been thrown into doubt by the shock election result, with pressure on Mrs May from factions within and outside her party to water down her threat to withdraw Britain from the EU with “no deal”.

The Prime Minister insisted that the Brexit negotiations – due to start next week – would start on time and that there would be no requests for a delay from the British side.

But she dodged a question on whether she now intended to pursue a “soft Brexit”, saying: “We want to maintain a close relationship and close partnership with the EU and individual member states.”

She added that after the election there was a “unity of purpose that having voted to leave the EU, that the Government gets on and makes a success of it”.

The President – asked if he believed that is what Mrs May intended as the leader of a minority Government – said it was for her to comment on the UK’s intentions.

Mrs May is said to be close to formalising a confidence and supply agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party, which has reservations about leaving the EU Customs Union and would refuse a hard border with the Republic of Ireland.

The summit in Paris was intended to set out a joint approach to tackling terrorism and online radicalisation, including levying hefty fines on the tech giants such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for failing to remove extremist content.

Echoing some of the rhetoric from British ministers about the need to allow the security services to access encrypted messages, Mr Macron said the intelligence agencies must be able to access digital content “no matter where it is located”.

Both leaders have stressed their “solidarity” in the face of terrorism. Mrs May said that “nowhere is our co-operation closer than in the area of defence and security”, with both countries leading international efforts to attack Islamic State with airstrikes.

Earlier, the German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble said in an interview with Bloomberg that if the UK changed its mind on leaving the EU, “of course they would find open doors” in Europe.

 

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Britain, Economic, European Court, European Union, Government, Legal

Free-trade deal possible post-Brexit following landmark EU court ruling

FREE TRADE AGREEMENT

ECJ

The court ruled that Brussels has trade negotiating competence over all goods and services.

Britain’s ambition to sign a quick Free Trade Agreement with the European Union after Brexit has received a significant boost after a landmark ruling by the European Court of Justice handed expanded trade negotiation powers to Brussels.

The much-anticipated decision from the court in Luxembourg surprised experts by ruling that on key areas – including financial services and transport – the European Union does not need to seek ratification of a trade deal by the EU’s 38 national and local parliaments.

Trade experts said the ECJ ruling could substantially reduce the risk of any future EU-UK free trade agreement getting bogged down in the EU national parliaments, opening the way for an FTA to be agreed by a qualified majority vote of EU member states.

“The Court of justice says all services – even transport – can be ratified by a qualified majority vote, which is potentially quite a big opening for the UK,” said Steve Peers, professor of EU law at Essex University. “It could certainly make things easier.”

In the ruling, the ECJ was asked to decide whether the new-generation bilateral EU-Singapore trade deal should be treated as a so-called ‘mixed’ agreement – that requires ratification by national parliaments – or could be agreed by a qualified majority vote of member states.

The court ruled that the EU did not have exclusive competence to conclude the Singapore deal, but said that only in two narrow areas – namely non-direct foreign investment and the investor-state dispute resolution mechanisms – did it need to seek ratification by national parliaments.

By contrast, the court said the EU did have competence to conclude agreements without ratification across the great majority of the Singapore agreement – contradicting parts of a previous opinion by the court’s advocate-general.

The court ruled that Brussels has trade negotiating competence over all goods and services.

FTA2jpg

Definition, meaning and purpose of a Free Trade Agreement (FTA).

Areas covered by EU competence include all goods and services, “including all transport services”, as well as intellectual property rights, competition policy, labour and environmental standards and the rules relating to exchange of information.

Legal and trade experts said the ruling had potentially massive implication for Brexit if the UK formulated its own FTA to avoid investment provisions and investor-state dispute mechanisms, relying on alternative arrangements such as bilateral investment treaties and WTO panels.

“This is the most significant ECJ case on EU trade policy for twenty years and has huge ramifications for any UK-EU FTA,” said Nicole Kar, head of international trade at Linklaters, the law firm.

“In policy terms, now the UK government will want to consider whether it moderates its ambition for the UK-EU FTA to those matters where there is exclusive competence in order to secure agreement through EU Member State governments by qualified majority voting.”

If Britain took a more expansive approach, Ms Kar warned, it risked any FTA getting mired in member state politics as happened last year when the regional Walloonian parliament of Belgium held the EU-Canada trade deal to ransom.

This problem arises because some EU member states, like Belgium, have domestic law that requires local parliaments to sign off on trade deals before they can be ratified by at a national level.

Allie Renison, head of EU and trade policy at the Institute of Directors, said the court ruling was to be welcomed and would make it easier for the EU to conclude deals “without fear of as many hold-ups from national and sub-national legislatures”.

“How this affects Brexit negotiations will depend on whether the final trade agreement includes investment provisions or not, although neither the UK or EU has expressed much interest in this to date,” she added.

“It’s important to remember that any eventual UK-EU trade agreement would not be about opening up each other’s markets in controversial areas, but trying to limit the amount of disruption to trade, and so it is unlikely to encounter the same resistance from other EU countries once concluded by the Commission.”

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European Union, France, Government, Politics, Society

Emmanuel Macron’s task is to restore confidence in the Fifth Republic

FRANCE

Macron

Emmanuel Macron wins the election to become French president.

The revelation of a last-minute attempt by computer hackers to influence the outcome of the French presidential election is another sane reminder of the forces at work in undermining democracy. In the end, however, it had little effect, as Emmanuel Macron secured his expected victory, at 39, to become the youngest French head of state of modern times. This is an extraordinary achievement for the President-Elect for he has been a candidate without a party.

Some will likely argue that the margin of triumph over Marine Le Pen was emphatic enough. Others might suggest that with around one third of voters still prepared to vote for the Front National (FN), this too was none the less a good result for a right-wing populist, anti-EU party.

The results suggest that if Mr Macron disappoints during his five-year tenure in office – as François Hollande so evidently did before him – then Ms Le Pen will be well positioned in 2022 to take power.

Given that this was an election in which neither candidate represented one of the mainstream Left- or Right- wing parties, Mr Macron has assumed an enormous level of responsibility on his shoulders.

The French electorate have clearly become weary of political leaders who promise much but deliver little. One prominent sign of their dissatisfaction with the political system as a whole was the lower than usual voter turnout, with participation possibly lower than at any time for 40 years when final figures are collated.

Whilst there is a sense that the French voter may have been left to feel short-changed, their rejection of the traditional parties has not exactly enamoured them of the populist fringe movement represented by Ms Le Pen. Or, indeed, of the alleged centrist appeal of Mr Macron, given his connections to former president Hollande.

Primarily, it is incumbent on Mr Macron to restore his country’s faith in the Fifth Republic over the next five years. This task will be made more difficult by the fact that his movement, En Marche!, has no parliamentary representation, something that will have to be swiftly rectified when elections take place to the assembly next month.

With little in the way of an activist base, Mr Macron faces a political paradox – one in which he may end up with the trappings of political office but none of the power that derives from a strong presence in the legislature. Moreover, and more worrying still, is that information in the hacked data might yet mire him in political scandal.

The contents of the hacked data were not disclosed because of the strict rules operating in France during the latter stages of the election campaign. But the new French president-elect must be hoping that there is nothing embarrassing, or worse, to be revealed.

Yet, the lesson of Ms Le Pen’s showing in the polls needs to be readily acknowledged by Europe’s elites, who have openly welcomed Mr Macron as a saviour. But they need to understand that this does not represent the definitive victory of the European project over its detractors. Far from it. It is a desperate throw of the dice for the EU to have relevance and meaning.

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