EU & UK post-Brexit trade deal is more urgent amid pandemic, no-deal would be irresponsible – Germany’s FM Maas

Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said the post-Brexit trade deal is even more important as people face the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, and the EU and Britain should not cause further problems for them.

The European Union (EU) wants to be constructive and is aiming for a deal, Maas said after a meeting with EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, adding that Brussels and London “must make quick progress in all open questions.”

With today’s health and economic challenges, people on both sides of the channel have enough to shoulder. So it would be totally irresponsible to burden them in this position with additional problems through a no-deal.

The comments come after UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Saturday approved a further month of Brexit negotiations. Speaking via video conference after the final scheduled round of talks, they tasked the two sides’ chief negotiators with working “intensively” to resolve the remaining differences. Fishing rights and state aid are still the most contentious issues.

The UK wants its partners to offer terms they’ve offered to Canada, not the “Australian-WTO type outcome, particularly, but we can more than live with it,” Johnson said.

In a joint statement after his discussion with von der Leyen, the PM’s office and the European Commission did not mention a target date for a resolution of the trade talks.

After a summit of EU leaders late last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she had seen no breakthrough in the UK-EU talks, but stressed that a post-Brexit trade deal was still possible before the end of this year.

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