Yahoo Finance Juncker won't renegotiate Brexit deal in phone call with May this week
Theresa May is set to speak with EU chief Jean-Claude Juncker for the second time in a week — but has been warned that she will not be able to renegotiate any part of the Brexit deal.
The British prime minister will speak to Juncker by phone later this week following a “friendly” call on Friday afternoon.
The pair’s relationship appears to have been mended since May gave Juncker a public dressing down at December’s EU leaders’ summit for referring to her Brexit strategy as “nebulous.”
“What friendly means in terms of the Juncker scale of friendliness? I would say friendly is on the upper side because there are other ways to describe such calls,” a commission spokesperson said on Monday. “So, stay with friendly, I think it matters.”
But the spokesperson stressed that Juncker will not enter into any discussion about changing parts of the withdrawal agreement, which they insisted is the “best and only deal possible.”
“President Junker had a friendly phone call with prime minister May on Friday. The two agreed to talk again this week,” the spokesperson told journalists in Brussels.
“There’s no negotiation because everything on the table has been established as approved. So, the priority now is to wait for events, to monitor what is happening — the ratification procedure on the UK side.”
READ MORE: May calls Juncker for help amid struggle to pass Brexit deal
The spokesperson also confirmed there will be no further meetings between the UK’s negotiators and EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier or his deputy Sabine Weyand.
“It is quite normal there won’t be any meetings because negotiations have finished,” the spokesperson said.
Rather than trying to change the deal, May is now asking the EU to convince her MPs that it will not trap the UK in the customs union through the Irish border backstop.
“We are continuing to work on further assurances, further undertakings from the European Union in relation to the concern that has been expressed by parliamentarians,” the prime minister said on Monday.
As well as Juncker, May has recently spoken twice to German chancellor Angela Merkel. Merkel subsequently spoke to Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar, who said the pair had conducted a “kind of brainstorm” about ways to held May get the deal through the Commons.
German foreign minister Heiko Maas will further those efforts on Tuesday when he travels to Dublin to meet Irish diplomats. Diplomats from all EU27 countries met to discuss the Brexit crisis in Brussels on Monday.
The EU is expected to deliver May a written assurance over the backstop before the Commons vote on the deal set for January 15. However, it appears unlikely that will be enough to sway the vote in the government’s favour.
READ MORE: Germany’s foreign minister heads to Dublin to talk Brexit
