EUROPEAN Council President Donald Tusk has warned Theresa May there is “no time to lose” in the Brexit negotiations.
With talks due to start in Brussels in little over a week, Mr Tusk said it was their “urgent task” to get on with the negotiations in “the best possible spirit”.
In a letter to the Prime Minister congratulating her on her reappointment, he said the two-year time-frame set out under Article 50 of the EU treaties left no room for delay.
“Our shared responsibility and urgent task now is to conduct the negotiations on the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union in the best possible spirit, securing the least disruptive outcome for our citizens, businesses and countries after March 2019,” he said.
“The time-frame set by Article 50 of the Treaty leaves us with no time to lose. I am fully committed to maintaining regular and close contact at our level to facilitate the work of our negotiators.”
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said he hoped there would be no further delay.
“As far as the commission is concerned, we can open negotiations tomorrow morning [Saturday] at half-past nine,” he said.
“I do hope that the result of the election will have no major impact on the negotiations we are desperately waiting for.”
One of the first senior EU figures to respond to the result was Sweden’s former foreign minister Carl Bildt.
He tweeted minutes after the vote was accurately predicted by the BBC/Sky/ITV exit poll on Thursday, that the Conservatives had suffered the “price to be paid for the lack of true leadership”.
Mr Bildt, who is now the co-chairman of the European Council on Foreign Relations, also described the outcome of the poll as “messy”.
Brussels’ chief negotiator Michel Barnier has said the talks would begin when Britain was ready, suggesting he would consider a short delay. In a message released on Twitter, Mr Barnier said: “Brexit negotiations should start when UK is ready; timetable and EU positions are clear. Let’s put our minds together on striking a deal.”
There was clear frustration with the EU at the failure of the election to deliver a decisive result after Mrs May, calling the poll in April, had said: “Every vote for the Conservatives will make me stronger when I negotiate for Britain with the prime ministers, presidents and chancellors of the European Union.”
The European Parliament’s Brexit co-ordinator, Guy Verhofstadt, said: “Yet another own goal, after Cameron now May, will make already complex negotiations even more complicated.”
Germany’s European Commissioner Gunther Oettinger said “a weaker partner weakens the whole thing”, while if both sides were strong “you get results more quickly”.
He told German radio the timetable for completing the talks was “ambitious” and Britain had already lost a lot of time by delaying its Article 50 letter and then calling an election.
“We will have to see whether the negotiation chief will remain the same, how the relevant ministers will look,” he said.
“Therefore I am expecting uncertainty, because it has an effect on everything. It has an effect on tariff negotiations, on contract negotiations in business and in politics.”
German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel said he hoped the election result would be seen as a message the British people do not want a hard Brexit.
However, Irish Prime Minister-elect Leo Varadkar said he was positive about the election’s outcome and the impact it would have on the Brexit talks, that begin on June 19.
He said: “The results of the UK election indicate to me that there is no strong mandate to proceed with a hard Brexit, which represents an opportunity for Ireland.”
He urged Mrs May’s minority administration to “reconsider whether it’s really good for Great Britain to withdraw from the European Union in this way”.
Mr Varadkar said he hoped the new Government was one “with which we can conduct serious negotiations and if possible keep Great Britain as close as possible to the European Union”.
In a wider contest, one expert said Britain’s trade links to China would be diminished by the minority government.
In a series of tweets, Manfed Weber, chairman of the powerful European People’s Party in the European Parliament and leader of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, said the date for the negotiations was unclear since the election result.
He described how the “the clock is ticking” for Brexit. “The date for the beginning of negotiations is now unclear,” he added in his first tweet.
Mr Weber then said on the micro-blogging site: “Our position is clear: we want good relations with the UK but Brexit means leaving the EU and the advantages that go with it.”
Before that he also made a foray into Northern Ireland politics, suggesting the Tories’ deal with the DUP could make the country less stable.
He added: “We are concerned about the situation in Northern Ireland. The peace process should not be put at risk.”
Right wing Netherlands Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders seized on the result to tell his 827,000 followers on Twitter: “Trust me. Brexit, Nexit and the end of the undemocratic Islam-loving monster called EU will all happen. There is no alternative.”
Meanwhile, Shi Zhiqin, of Carnegie-Tsinghua Centre for Global Policy, told the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong Britain’s main concern is to keep China as a trade partner after it leaves the EU Single Market.
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