German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said that the U.K. would be welcomed back to the European Union if the British decided they no longer wanted to quit the bloc.<\/p>\nFrench President Emmanuel Macron also said the \u201cdoor is open\u201d for a return, but warned that it would be much harder to achieve once negotiations have started. <\/p>\n
In his first public comments on the matter since the U.K. election, Schaeuble said that \u201cit\u2019s up to the British government to take their own decisions\u201d on Brexit. He said he had discussed the surprise election outcome with Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond the day after the vote, and concluded that \u201cwe have to leave them some days\u201d to decide on the way forward.<\/p>\n
Asked if the government might reverse its decision to quit the EU, he said it \u201cwould not be helpful\u201d to speculate whether that will happen or not. \u201cThe British government has said we will stay with the Brexit,\u201d Schaeuble said in the interview during Bloomberg\u2019s G-20 Germany Day. \u201cWe take the decision as a matter of respect. But if they wanted to change their decision, of course, they would find open doors.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I think that they are afraid that if Brexit happens, and Labour ends up in charge, it won’t be a complete clusterf%$#, and could lead to other countries to pulling back from the EU.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Germans don’t want a Brexit, but if it happens, they want to be sure that it is painful for the British, and they also want to be sure that it won’t upset the existing political consensus. I think that the disaster for Theresa May, particularly in context of the German dogma for austerity, has …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[630,394,417,374,486],"class_list":["post-180229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-european-union","tag-foreign-relations","tag-international-commerce","tag-politics","tag-schadenfreude"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180229"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}