LONDON — Prime Minister Theresa May asked the European Union on Friday to delay Britain’s departure from the bloc for a second time, until June 30, and conceded that the country was preparing to take part in elections for the European Parliament in May.
Mrs. May made a formal request in a letter to Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, for a postponement of the departure, now scheduled for April 12, but analysts said her proposed date was likely to be rejected in Brussels — and some countries said they had yet to see a sufficient reason to support an extension of any sort.
Mr. Tusk was pushing European leaders to offer Mrs. May a one-year extension for Brexit, as the process is known, while leaving the door open to an earlier withdrawal if Britain ratifies a deal, according to a senior European Union official familiar with his thinking. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, in keeping with standard practice.
That plan, described as a “flextension,” would eliminate the need for European leaders to repeatedly consider British requests for a delay. And in allowing Britain to leave sooner if an agreement is reached, Mr. Tusk appears to be trying to make it clear that Brussels is not trying to trap Britain in the bloc.
Mr. Tusk’s plan would still need the backing of the leaders of European Union member states, but there were some signs of resistance from France, which typically takes the hardest line in these matters, Austria and the Netherlands.
“The French president has made very clear that if we want to grant an extension: What for?” the French finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, said before a meeting of European finance ministers in Bucharest, Romania, on Friday. He added, “It is up to the British government to give an answer to that key question.”
The Netherlands have generally been more sympathetic to Britain, but Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, expressed exasperation with the British negotiating approach. “I keep being amazed at how the fifth economy of the world handles its interests,” he said.
In asking for an extension until June 30 — the same date she previously asked for, but which the European Union rejected — Mrs. May was bowing to pressure from within her Conservative Party not to be seen as forcing the country into a longer delay.
But she was also laying the ground for a more protracted extension by agreeing that Britain was prepared to participate in European elections in May. That was seen in Brussels as a condition for another Brexit postponement.
Those moves have not gone over well with hard-line Brexit supporters. That rancor was reflected in a Twitter post on Wednesday by the lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg, who recommended that, if “stuck” in the European Parliament over the next year that Britain be “as difficult as possible.”
Mrs. May has sought over the past week to break months of deadlock by meeting with the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, to try to reach an agreement on withdrawal. But she said in her letter to Mr. Tusk that if those talks did not produce a compromise, she would hold a series of votes in Parliament on alternative paths in the hopes that lawmakers would eventually settle on one.
“This impasse cannot be allowed to continue,” Mrs. May wrote. “In the U.K. it is creating uncertainty and doing damage to faith in politics, while the European Union has a legitimate desire to move on to decisions about its own future.”
The prime minister’s Brexit deal has already been rejected three times by British lawmakers, and there is likely to be a lively debate in Brussels on whether — or more particularly, on what terms — to grant a second extension. Britain was originally scheduled to leave the bloc on March 29, but European leaders granted a short extension to give Parliament more time to approve the withdrawal deal.
Mrs. May and Mr. Corbyn met on Wednesday, and teams from both sides continued the discussions on Thursday. The session ended with neither breakthroughs nor breakdowns.
The Labour Party received a glimmer of good news in a by-election in South Wales, retaining a traditional Labour seat in an area that had backed Brexit in the 2016 referendum. But amid low turnout, the margin was relatively slim, with the winner, Ruth Jones, receiving 39.5 percent of the vote, compared with 31 percent for the Conservatives and 9 percent for the rejuvenated far-right U.K. Independence Party.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/world/europe/brexit-extension-theresa-may.html
2019-04-05 14:09:23Z
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