Press

“Last summer, the chances of this outcome seemed minimal,” wrote Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, a London-based research institute, in a briefing paper. But the odds have improved, he said, because the opposition Labour Party is now more positive about that notion if it cannot achieve its favored outcome, which is a general election.

The Irish-only backstop has not so much disappeared as been folded into the all-UK one. As trade expert Sam Lowe said in a tweet: “[Northern Ireland]-specific ultimate insurance policy will live; will just be a question of how many law degrees you need to find it.”

“It’s likely we will see populists use the EU as a scapegoat for all the misgivings they have about politics domestically, just as we saw in the UK’s EU referendum,” says Agata Gostyńska-Jakubowska, a Brussels-based research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, a pro-EU policy group. “The whole election campaign will be about what the European project is about, what European values mean now.”

“If you look in the cyber arena, laying aside the disinformation operations, if you look at the traditional cyber attacks that we worry about, the attacks on our national critical infrastructure and so on, a lot of the tools you would need to deal with some of these things are not NATO tools, they are the kinds of tools the EU has or is developing, to deal with the resilience of electrical grids that stretch across Europe and so on,” said Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform.

En esta misma línea, Agata Gostynska, investigadora asociada del Centro para Reforma Europea, señala que es "cuestión de percepciones" y que, actualmente, es "más efectivo apelar a los miedos de la gente", como sucede con el sentimiento antiinmigración.