The UK will soon start two years of negotiations with the EU on how to exit the union. They will probably stretch from October 2016 to October 2018.

This makes next year a critical one for the UK, so I wanted to research what might happen during it that could affect the exit negotiations. That research has left me kind of stunned. I’d read one or two polls from the rest of Europe before, but if the datasets cited below are correct 2017 could be an absolutely brutal year for the EU.

Let’s examine four political events we know will happen and examine the possible outcomes. These events are in chronological order.

Switzerland: Midnight, February 9th 2017

In 2014 Switzerland voted in a referendum to end freedom of movement with the EU. The constitutionally binding vote gave the Federal Council three years to negotiate a new arrangement that would allow for immigration quotas to be re-established. That three year deadline expires at midnight on February 9th.

Switzerland is not in the EU, but thanks to over two hundred treaties it is effectively in both the EEA (European Economic Area) and Schengen. It also pays money into the EU budget. The treaties the Swiss have signed with the rest of Europe include an ominously named “guillotine clause”. If any one of them is violated, they are all revoked automatically. The Swiss knew this and voted by a tiny margin to revoke freedom of movement anyway, presumably in the hope of finding a better deal during the post-vote negotiations.

Those negotiations never happened. The EU flatly refused to even discuss the issue. What’s more, they put an ultimatum on the table: the EU would no longer sign bilateral trade deals with the Swiss. If they want cooperation to continue, Switzerland will have to fully join the EU and recognise the supremacy of Brussels and the European courts.

This means that in February one of three things will happen:

1. The government implements quotas, triggering a “Swixit”
2. Another referendum is held informing the Swiss that no negotiation was possible and asking for confirmation, and that referendum is once again lost by the government, thereby also triggering a collapse of the trade deals and the imposition of tariffs on Switzerland.
3. The referendum is won by the government and immigration quotas are not implemented.

Switzerland joining the EU seems …. unlikely. Polls show support for joining at 15% and it’s even less in Parliament. The UK referendum showed that opinions can shift quickly and dramatically, but the mood is defiant. The Swiss Parliament formally withdrew its long dormant EU membership application just one week before the Brexit vote with one MP saying “only a few lunatics would want to join the EU now”.

It’s impossible to predict the outcome of the next Swiss EU/EEA referendum (assuming there is one), because it was so close last time. But if the Swiss do choose to get kicked out it’ll be another big blow to the EU’s prestige, and especially to Germany with which it has huge levels of trade.

The Netherlands: March 2017

Just one month after the Swiss make their final call there will be a general election in the Netherlands. Calls for an EU exit referendum there have been growing for some time and now appear hard to ignore.

This is the current Dutch Premier, Mark Rutte.

He had this to say on the topic of a NExit:

“I don’t believe there’s much interest in a referendum”

In fact a poll by Ipsos showed around half/half support for having a referendum, and that 64% would vote in if there was one. Another poll for De Telegraaf showed 88% support for holding a referendum. A third poll showed over 50% support for having a vote.

This absolute denial of polling reality by Rutte is the kind of WTF Europeans are getting used to. It makes a bit more sense when you realise that the man doesn’t actually like democracy:

“I’m totally against referendums and I’m totally, totally, totally against referendums on multilateral agreements because it makes no sense, as we’ve seen with the Dutch referendum”

Wait, what Dutch referendum?

In April the Dutch voted on a new EU/Ukraine “association agreement”, which gives Ukraine a free trade deal and steps towards visa-free access to the bloc. The agreement itself is not that critical but the vote was widely used as a vote on the EU itself. It went against the EU by 61% to 32%, albeit on low turnout of only 32%.

The referendum was non-binding. Rutte announced to the Dutch Parliament that he had been forbidden from talking about it by the EU itself and that therefore the vote would not be discussed at all until after the Brexit referendum, in case calling attention to it increased support for Leave.

The controversial politician Geert Wilders is promising to call a referendum if he wins and his Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) is leading in the polls. It is plausible that his party could win the elections, or at least end up as a powerful member of a coalition. If he does win there would presumably be a several month long referendum campaign throughout the summer of 2017, in parallel with the British negotiations. Dutch referendums cannot legally force changes to treaties, but neither can British referendums and that didn’t stop the Brits.

The Dutch have a lot to lose from Brussels forcing a UK/NL trade war on them. Most EU countries only trade significantly with a few others, and for the Brits that “few others” contains the Netherlands. If the Dutch are forced to impose import taxes on British goods in retaliation for the UK leaving, that will damage them too. They will be watching how the UK exit negotiations are going with a lot of interest.

Could Geert Wilders win his referendum? He’s not a man who runs from a fight. He lives under 24/7 armed guard and has previously been banned then unbanned from the UK due to his outspoken criticism of Islam. He has appeared on an al-Qaeda hit list and been the target of a fundamentalist Islamic preacher who urged followers to behead him. He’s also survived a prosecution for “inciting hatred” (he was found not guilty). He campaigns on a platform of exiting the EU and closing the Dutch borders, and it looks like he might well win.

France: May 2017

Just two months later France will hold a general election.

Thought Wilders sounded tough? Marine Le Pen makes him look like a jar of jelly. The leader of the French Front National party was only 8 years old when she survived a bombing that destroyed twelve apartments. The explosives were a terrorist attack meant to assassinate her father, a racist anti-semite. As an adult she would expel him from his own political party and he would publicly announce that he was ashamed she was his daughter. Asked if she ever feared for her own safety, she replied “I am impermeable to fear.”

Like Geert Wilders, she’s been prosecuted and found not guilty of hate speech against Muslims. And just like Wilders she is currently leading the opinion polls. The current French President François Hollande is on track to be wiped out.

The French presidential elections are a complex two-round system and it’s not clear if she would win the full contest, even though she will clear the first round easily. Even though her poll numbers have surged, the Front National is still unpopular with many French and they might unite against her in an anyone-but-Le-Pen showdown.

But Ipsos MORI’s May poll found French support for a “Fraxit” at 40%. The French actually have lower favorability scores towards the EU than the British, with only Greece having a worse opinion. Of course polls often disguise important detail — there are lots of French people who passionately believe in the EU and the idea of a federal Europe. And for those who don’t Le Pen is their only way to get a referendum, which means many might simply prefer a more mainstream president over having a vote.

It seems possible but unlikely that France would pull out of the EU, as the Franco-German alliance is the core of the union and France rejecting it in a referendum would almost certainly end the EU for good. The British could vote out knowing the EU would continue regardless. French voters would have no such assurance.

October 2017

In October Germany has a general election. Here are the current polling figures:

Check out that light blue line at the bottom. That’s the “Alternativ für Deutschland”, Germany’s only Eurosceptic party. The start of its rise matches the appointment of a new leader, Frauke Petry, a woman who got herself in hot water when she pointed out that German law allowed police to shoot refugees at the border. The AfD is eurosceptic by German standards, i.e. not very. It advocates abandoning the Euro and major immigration reform, but not a referendum and certainly not withdrawal. The name is a rebuttal to Angela Merkel, who described rescuing the Euro as “without alternative”.

The AfD’s current growth cannot continue forever but if the trend seen since August 2015 holds up for another eight months then we can easily see by extrapolation it will become Germany’s leading party by February: just as Switzerland to the south is deciding on its own future.

It’s hard to imagine any kind of serious anti-EU movement in Germany. Support for the EU is currently at around 80%. The migration crisis has been ended by the Balkan states erecting border walls plus the deal with Turkey, and the fact that some refugees are returning home after realising they were lied to by the people smugglers.

It’s possible that if Turkey revokes the migrant deal and large numbers start moving towards Germany again, that the politics of the country could change fast. But I don’t know if that would result in a major shift away from the EU as a whole. Germany has a lot of influence over the EU and therefore has little to gain from leaving it.

On words

Whatever the outcome of the votes are, we will be hearing a lot more about “far right” parties in the next 18 months. I put the term in quotes because it’s not clear from my research that this label makes any sense at all.

If you put aside the EU and Islam then Le Pen, Wilders and Petry are all completely different. Wilders has a pretty conventional conservative agenda (lower taxes, emphasis on education etc) but Le Pen is an ordinary socialist (protectionism, money printing, anti-privatisation). Petry doesn’t even want to leave the EU, just the Euro. If you talked to these people about something other than immigration you’d never guess that they were supposedly ideological allies.

The term “far right” has apparently been detached from the traditional meaning of left/right wing and now means anyone who supports border controls, which is not a controversial policy in most of the world. This is probably why such parties are rising throughout the continent. Watch out for journalists, academics and other self-proclaimed political experts abusing standard terminology to make you jump to conclusions.

Conclusion

I started out by wanting to know if the chance of other referendums was real and how that’d affect the UK’s exit negotiations. By now I’m wondering if there’ll be any EU left to negotiate with by the end of the talks.

The statistics are dire. Europe is on a knife edge and its leadership is complacent. In 1989 the Soviet Union had been in existence for 67 years and seemed like an immovable object. Within two years it had collapsed completely following a wave of secession referendums enabled by a law change in April 1990. The USSR shows that political unions can seem unstoppable and then crumble overnight.

The UK will soon pick a new leader and send them to negotiate with the EU, which will refuse to compromise. The negotiators are likely to be either Boris Johnson, Theresa May or Michael Gove. I feel neutral about BoJo and Gove, and actively dislike Theresa May, but none of these people are stupid and all of them are likely to prove tough negotiators.

If the UK announces that it will create a new European Trade Area with any other economically equal countries that exit the EU, featuring no trade barriers but controlled migration, then the existence of an alternative would likely increase support for EU exit in other major European economies. By adopting a “compromise is death” negotiating strategy the EU leaves the UK with only one card to play — sticking in the knife and helping them along.