“If someone thinks the EU will give in to any sort of change in tack from what’s being done so far, it’s a mistake,” PM Muscat tells POLITICO
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Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat swatted aside the idea that a last-minute British charm offensive at today’s EU-Arab summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt Egypt could change the course of Brexit negotiations.
Muscat said “if someone thinks the EU will give in to any sort of change in tack from what’s being done so far, it’s a mistake,” Muscat told POLITICO in an interview from a Socialist congress in Madrid. “There are no exceptions to the single market, to the four freedoms. This is what we really believe in,” he said.
Muscat supports an extension of the Brexit deadline if the U.K. requests it —”definitely we should give her more time” — but he ruled out, as a matter of principle, a re-opening of the Withdrawal Agreement: “It’s not an issue of whether we lose a couple of millions [of euro] here or there … I don’t think we can fudge on principles,” he said.
Instead Muscat urged fellow European Union leaders to focus on a long-term plan to convince the U.K. to rejoin the EU within a generation.
“Our aim should be that, in our generation, we make sure that the European project thrives in a way that the next generation of British politicians ask for their country to approve that the U.K. rejoins the European Union,” adding “it will be a different EU for sure.”
Muscat said he expected Brexiteers to send “hate mail” for supporting an eventual British re-entry. Nevertheless he said he believes Brexit will go ahead in 2019.
Muscat said that despite the country’s historic ties with Britain as a former colony, it knows where its allegiances are: with the EU.
He said he told U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May that message earlier this month in London: “I told her that if there is one country that wants badly a deal with between the U.K. and the EU it’s us, for obvious historical reasons mostly. But we will never break ranks. We will never break ranks with the EU because the EU is our family,” Muscat said.
