Brexit deal: Reaction across continental Europe

In Britain, the UK-EU deal was roundly lambasted for falling short of prime minister David Cameron’s promises during the 2015 general election. But across continental Europe, the reaction was mixed.

While some commentators bemoaned the emergence of a “multi-speed” Europe and voiced concern for the future of the European project, others expressed relief that the deal would ensure Brexit was less likely.

Germany

Germany’s right-leaning Welt am Sonntag said that Mr Cameron had gone beyond his agenda and reformed the entire European Union. “Cameron has done the whole union an invaluable service,” the editorial read, by forcing the EU to forgo a political union, “the grand delusion of Germany’s European policy”.

“Other rich countries, particularly Germany, will profit from the rules allowing the UK to curb welfare tourism,” the paper said.

If the UK stays in the EU, it added, the union’s power centre could shift from a German-French engine to a German-Polish-British-French project which would focus on “really important tasks — the expansion of the union and the protection of its borders in the south and east in co-operation with Nato and Turkey.”

The centre-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung argued that Mr Cameron had failed to achieve the fundamental reform of the EU that he originally sought, but had forged a deal to assuage Conservative Eurosceptics back home.

“From the start it was all about finding formulations that would allow Cameron to score points at home but didn’t really change the European status quo,” the paper wrote.

“Cameron got the drama that he apparently needed for the domestic stage. Whether that will pay off in the referendum in June is anyone’s guess.”

France

Centre-left daily Le Monde said that the deal was a “success for the British conservative leader” and that he “won not insignificant concessions on the four points that he wanted.” This gave the UK a “special status” Europe.

It worried that this victory “amplified the movement towards Europe à la carte” and puts added pressure on a Europe already under strain from the migrant crisis. “The divisions and lack of solidarity in Europe has never seemed so deep,” it said.

Leftwing daily Liberation said that concessions made to satisfy the latest bout of “British hysteria” risked a “dangerous spiral” for Europe. “What will stop Poland or Hungary organising their own referendum?” it wrote.

It carried a separate piece saying that the deal was “good advertising” for anti-European parties, including France’s far-right Front National.

Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French foreign minister, played down the deal in an interview with the Journal du Dimanche, saying that there had been “no treaty change, no veto for the UK on strengthening the Eurozone and no questioning of the principle of free movement.”

Spain

The EU deal met a frosty reception in the Spanish press, with an editorial in the Sunday edition of El País declaring that the EU had “paid a high and unjustifiable price to secure the continued membership of a wayward partner”.

The concessions granted to Britain, it added, called into question “basic principles of the community such as free movement of workers and the ban on discrimination based on nationality”.

The more conservative El Mundo daily echoed that sentiment on Sunday, saying European leaders had been forced to produce a “tailor-made suit” for the British prime minister. Mr Cameron, it said, had put the other EU leaders “on the spot to save his own political skin” and behaved “like a true pyromaniac”.

Still, the decision to accommodate London had been the right one. “The pact represents a clear slowdown in the progress of the union,” El Mundo said in its editorial. “But Brexit would have been even more lethal to the EU.”

Italy

In Italy, which has long been one of the staunchest advocates for further EU integration, commentators lamented a deal that they viewed as a blow to the European project.

“The real consequence of the summit is extraordinarily important: Brussels has officially enshrined a multi-speed Europe,” Romano Prodi, the former Italian prime minister and former president of the EU Commission, wrote in Il Messaggero, Rome’s leading daily newspaper.

La Repubblica, Italy’s main left-leaning daily newspaper, featured a front-page column by British historian Timothy Garton Ash, who warned ominously that the shock of a Brexit “could mark the beginning of the end of the European Union”. Its main headline read “Enough Europe: the pact with the EU splits London”.

In Corriere della Sera, Carlo Calenda, Italy’s newly appointed ambassador to the EU who was picked by Matteo Renzi, the prime minister, to take a tougher line against Brussels, wrote that the UK deal was “essentially compatible” with a Europe based on “concentric circles” with different levels of integration.

Poland

“A difficult compromise with Cameron,” splashed Poland’s most popular quality daily, as the country’s newspapers reacted cautiously to an EU reform deal that seeks to cut benefit payments to prospective Polish immigrants to the UK.

“While Warsaw has sought to mitigate the cuts in principle, a few weeks ago it was clear that it was willing to accept the costs of partial discrimination against Poles to avoid Brexit,” wrote Tomasz Bielecki, Brussels correspondent for Gazeta Wyborcza.

“The main line of defence of the government … is that a possible Brexit would make the situation of Poles in the UK far worse, because then their rights would not be defended in Brussels,” wrote Mr Bielecki.

Many newspapers in Poland, which was caught between protecting the rights of some 700,000 Poles in the UK and doing whatever it could to support its key political and security ally in Europe, accepted prime minister Beata Szydlo’s declaration that she had “taken care of the interests of Poles using the social benefits of the EU.”

But not all were convinced. “Persons wishing to travel to the UK to work will not share this optimism,” noted Fakt, the country’s most popular tabloid and biggest-selling newspaper.

Switzerland

Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper said British voters had the potential to create a “political earthquake” which could throw the EU into the “most difficult crisis in its history”.

The vote had direct importance for Switzerland, which is not an EU member. Switzerland is renegotiating its contractual relationship with the EU, which currently gives it market access, following a Swiss referendum in 2014 which angered Brussels by backing curbs on EU immigration.

Those talks are “in practice blocked” until Britain votes, the NZZ said. If Britain voted to leave the EU, Brussels would have little appetite for granting London big concessions — through fear of encouraging copycats, the NZZ argued.