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Europe urges dazed Britain to get moving on exit

 
Protesters gather Saturday in Parliament Square in London, two days after 52 percent of United Kingdom voters supported an exit from the European Union. A treaty sets guidelines for severing ties and provides for a two-year window for talks.
Protesters gather Saturday in Parliament Square in London, two days after 52 percent of United Kingdom voters supported an exit from the European Union. A treaty sets guidelines for severing ties and provides for a two-year window for talks.
Published June 26, 2016

LONDON — 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 EU, 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 EU'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 EU, 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.

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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 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."

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.

Meanwhile, an online petition calling for a new referendum had the support of over 2.1 million people as of Saturday evening.