"No one can exclude the dizzying scenario of an endless Brexit"

Clouds pile up on promises made by Boris Johnson of a definitive exit from the UK's EU. And the upcoming elections are unpredictable.

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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at a meeting at 10 Downing Street on November 5th.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at a meeting at 10 Downing Street on November 5th. Tolga Akmen / AP

Chronic. "Let's finish it! Never have the protagonists of Brexit been so unanimous in calling for a final clap on this tragicomic soap opera that will soon be four years old. The British, whatever their edge, can not take it anymore. The 27 states of the European Union have long since passed the stage of exasperation. The trouble is that the real issues of divorce, long scrambled by politicians, only clearly appear to the British public today. The other slight problem is that the "deal" presented by Boris Johnson as decisive and final is in fact only the starting point of years of trade and security negotiations with a highly unpredictable outcome.

Even if they finally agree on the date of the breakup of the common life, Europeans and British are far from having decided the "fate of the children". Condemned by history and geography to live side by side, they can not suddenly cut through the thousand ties that unite them without building up new relationships. Thus, the last 15 minutes of Brexit could prove to be the longest.

"Thatcherism under steroids"

Strangely, the coming to power of draft Boris Johnson has made the stakes clearer: Brexit is intended to turn the United Kingdom into a competing power of the EU, untied of European fiscal, social and environmental rules. While Theresa May was trying to drown the fish, Boris Johnson claims this new Thatcherian revolution. The bright future of the "global United Kingdom" that he has promised to pro-Brexit voters goes through a return to the great free-trade adventure of the British Empire. "Freed" from Brussels, London could negotiate successful trade agreements with the Commonwealth countries, and first with the United States.

Trump has just made a big mistake in the Prime Minister's argument.

But Donald Trump has just made a major hitch in the argument of the Prime Minister. Supporter of Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit Party (British far-right), the US president enjoins Johnson to make an alliance with him – which the latter excludes – and conditions the granting of a free trade agreement to a more radical break with the EU than the new deal negotiated with the 27.

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Trump's intervention, however, validates the anti-American rhetoric of Labor opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, who presents Boris Johnson as a Washington valet and his Brexit as an act of submission to Trump whose first consequence would be of him. sell the NHS ". A formula pointing the risk of a seizure of the American giants of pharmacy and medicine, in case of free trade agreement, on this free health system venerated by the British.