Europe urges a dazed Britain to get moving

By Steven Erlanger and Dan Bilefsky, New York Times News Service

Sunday, June 26, 2016 | 2 a.m.

With British politics in turmoil, there were already clear indications Saturday of a tense and bickering divorce from the European Union.

Britons woke up to a diminished currency and much confusion about the consequences of their vote Thursday to quit the European Union, including who would be their next prime minister. The leaders of the campaign to exit the bloc, or “Brexit,” continued to disagree over what kind of relationship they wanted with Europe, and thousands of Britons started signing a petition asking for a second referendum.

Meeting in Berlin, European leaders told Britain to hurry up and begin the formal process of exiting the union, while Prime Minister David Cameron said that process could wait until his replacement was chosen in October, and leaders of the “Leave” campaign suggested it could come even later, after a new round of talks with Brussels.

“I do not understand why the British government needs until October to decide whether to send the divorce letter to Brussels,” Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, told German television.

“I would like it immediately,” he said. “It is not an amicable divorce, but it was also not an intimate love affair.”

The emergency meeting of foreign ministers from the European Union’s six founding states — Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands — revealed impatience and exasperation with Britain.

The Europeans want Cameron to start the legal process of quitting by immediately invoking Article 50 of the bloc’s governing treaty, which sets guidelines for severing ties and provides for a two-year window for talks. But nothing in the treaty requires Britain to invoke the article until it chooses, since it remains a full member of the bloc, with all privileges and obligations, until it quits.

The EU has other considerable challenges, including the migrant crisis, Greece’s turbulent economy and sanctions on Russia over Ukraine. European leaders, looking at Spanish elections today and German and French elections next year, want the uncertainty around the British question resolved as soon as possible so they can try to show their own voters that Brussels is capable and on track.

But the British have to decide what they want in a future relationship with the European Union, given the disagreement among the Brexit leaders, who are not a government. Cameron, humiliated and an opponent of leaving, clearly has no desire to bear the burden of those negotiations — both internally, within the divided Conservative Party, and externally, with other European leaders. His counterparts in Europe think he has damaged not only himself and his country, but also them, by energizing European populism and diminishing the bloc.

The French are particularly impatient, with Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault saying Saturday that negotiations on Britain’s departure from the bloc should begin soon. He warned that Cameron will face “very strong” pressure to accelerate the process when European leaders meet Tuesday in Brussels, where Cameron is expected to be asked to leave the room when the others discuss their plans. The Europeans are also expected to cancel Britain’s six-month presidency of the council, which was to begin in July 2017.

There is confusion about Britain, too. Ayrault said Saturday that “they must designate a new prime minister, which would certainly require several days.” In fact, the process will be considerably longer, because Conservative lawmakers must first agree on a leadership contest and decide when it will be. That contest will involve numerous ballots of Conservative legislators to winnow down candidates to two, and then the 150,000 or so registered members of the party (who had joined at least three months ago, to prevent infiltration) will vote by mail.

Even so, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said at a news conference in Potsdam that it “shouldn’t take forever” for Britain to deliver formal notification of Article 50, “but I would not fight over a short period of time.”

Merkel, trying to be conciliatory in the face of facts, said that she was seeking an “objective, good” climate in talks on Britain’s exit, and that there was “no need to be particularly nasty in any way in the negotiations; they must be conducted properly.”

Already weakened politically by the migrant crisis, Merkel was expected to meet Saturday with 20 top officials from her coalition government of center-right and center-left parties. But with elections coming, coalition unity is beginning to falter as the junior partner, the Social Democrats, seek to create their own profile for voters.

The Scottish Cabinet held an emergency meeting in Edinburgh on Saturday after the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said it was “democratically unacceptable” that Scotland should be removed from the EU against its will.

Scotland voted overwhelmingly in favor of remaining in the bloc, and Sturgeon, who leads the Scottish National Party that favors independence from Britain, reiterated after the meeting Saturday that a second independence referendum was “highly likely.”

She said Scotland planned to enter discussions with EU institutions and European governments to protect its place in the bloc. Sturgeon said she would establish an advisory panel on the legal, financial and diplomatic implications of the vote.

As Cameron’s announced resignation sank in, speculation abounded that Boris Johnson, a former mayor of London and the most visible leader of the “Leave” campaign, was the favorite to replace him. But there were reports in British newspapers that Cameron and his deputy, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, were eager to keep Johnson from profiting from what they considered to be his betrayal and that they were organizing support for Theresa May, the home secretary.

The Labour Party was also in turmoil, with a leadership challenge being organized against Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left legislator who was blamed for a halfhearted effort to keep Britain inside the European Union.

In a speech in London on Saturday, Corbyn largely ignored the no-confidence effort. Instead, he told supporters that Labour would fight to ensure that its agenda was at the heart of discussions as Britain negotiated its exit from the bloc.

He mentioned the importance of employment protections and human rights, said the referendum had laid bare divisions in the country over immigration and underlined the despair of those hit by austerity measures.

“Today it’s important we learn from what has taken place,” he said. Asked if he would run again if his leadership was challenged, he replied, “Yes, I am here.”

As markets plunged over the uncertainty, the credit ratings agency Moody’s lowered its outlook for the United Kingdom, citing the potential for weaker economic growth in the long, messy process of disentangling Britain from the European Union.

The sense of shock was particularly acute in London, a cosmopolitan city and an important financial center, which reacted to the vote with anger, disappointment and even tears.

“I was crying yesterday,” Camila Diehl, 26, who works for a cancer charity in London, said Saturday. “I just can’t believe this is happening. This is not the country I know.”

Diehl, who has a Colombian mother and a British father, said she was worried about what the vote would mean for funding for scientific research. She is now questioning her future in Britain, she said.

Mayor Sadiq Kahn, who supported “Remain,” took to Facebook on Friday, saying he wanted to “send a clear message to every European resident living in London — you are very welcome here.”

“There are nearly one million European citizens living in London today, and they bring huge benefits to our city — working hard, paying taxes, working in our public services and contributing to our civic and cultural life,” he wrote.

A petition calling for London to vote to join the European Union has drawn more than 150,000 signatures, while a separate online petition calling for a new referendum had the support of more than 2.1 million people as of Saturday evening.

And in the latest consequence of Britain’s vote to withdraw from Brussels, Britain’s highest-ranking European Union official — Jonathan Hill, the commissioner for financial services — resigned Saturday.