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In comments echoed by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the French president demanded continued regulatory harmonisation as the price for protecting the flow of trade, a demand that will be a cause of concern for the Conservative government.
Macron, who noted in an aside that his country would soon be the only nuclear power in the EU, told reporters: “If Boris Johnson wants a very ambitious trade deal, there has to be very ambitious regulatory convergence”, adding in English: “Be my guest.”
“We do not want them to be an unfair competitor,” Macron said. “My message to the UK is that the more loyal we are vis-a-vis each other, the closer relationship we can have.
“If the British prime minister and the British parliament want an ambitious trade deal, they know where the European standards are … The more they are attracted to reducing standards – on climate, social standards or anything else – the more they walk away from the European market, the more they will be away from us. The more ambitious the trade deal, the more we need regulatory harmonisation.”
The intervention from Macron came as the new commission president Ursula von der Leyen warned that the post-Brexit negotiations on the future relationship would drag on beyond 2020.[...]
Von der Leyen appeared to directly contradict the prime minister by warning that certain parts of the deal would need to be prioritised, including trade in goods, fisheries and security cooperation, but that others, potentially including the arrangements for the financial services sector, would be left for later.
“We will have to prioritise,” Von der Leyen said at the end of a two-day leaders’ summit in Brussels. “We will put specific focus on those issues that were an economic cliff edge at the end of 2020 if they would not be done. Why is that? These are issues where we have neither a framework to fall back on nor the possibility to take unilateral contingency measures covering the period after 1 January 2021.”
Von der Leyen described the plan as a matter of “sequencing” adding that “there will be more emphasis on a certain ranking”. [...]