European leaders lost no time yesterday in offering David Cameron talks on EU reform, bidding to ease uncertainty about Britain’s future in the bloc ahead of the in-or-out referendum the Prime Minister will call now he has been re-elected.
France’s Socialist President Francois Hollande invited the triumphant Conservative to Paris once he has formed a government in which he will no longer have to rely on coalition partners like the arch-europhile Liberal Democrats.
Jean-Claude Juncker, the EU’s new chief executive whose team is already working to cut the red tape and interference that angers many Britons, sees scope for reform short of major treaty changes and told Cameron: “I stand ready to work with you to strike a fair deal for the United Kingdom in the EU.”
Juncker is ready to strike fair deal for the UK in the EU
Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and leaders of the EU institutions in Brussels should offer a variety of fixes for gripes the generally pro-Europe leader of an often Eurosceptical party says must be sorted out before he puts British membership to an unpredictable popular vote within a couple of years.
But the EU Executive again stressed that there could be no renegotiation of basic treaties that irk Britons opposed to immigration from poorer EU states. As Hollande will surely tell Cameron, governments like Paris, which need referendums to ratify treaties, are in no position to get such measures past their own increasingly Europhobic electorates.
European Commission President Juncker is also ready for talks and said he looks forward to hearing concrete proposals from Cameron, who has listed a number of general demands since promising the plebiscite in early 2013 to appease Conservative Eurosceptics and outflank the rising Ukip Party.
After two years of saying little and quietly hoping the issue might go away if Cameron lost power, EU leaders woke up yesterday realising they now must confront the problem head on. For all the exasperation with Britain’s love-hate relationship with the continent, most think the Union would be weakened by the loss of its second biggest economy, a global commercial power with significant military and diplomatic clout.
Paris and Berlin are ready to study British demands for EU reform “if that allowed them to argue for staying in the EU”, a French government source said.