Germany, France struggle to hold EU center after Brexit

Within hours of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, nationalist parties across the bloc were clamoring for their own exit referendums, including in France, one half of the two-nation engine that has driven the EU project since its beginnings as a lowly coal and steel union in 1951.

That laid bare the challenge facing German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande as they try to hold the rest of the 27 nations of the EU together, as for the first time a full member has decided it would be better off alone.

Calling the vote a “watershed” for Europe, Merkel said the bloc “is strong enough to find the right answers.” Hollande described Brexit as a severe test that would force Europe’s leaders “to take a clear look at the ineffectiveness of the EU and people’s loss of confidence in the European project.”

Merkel didn’t spell out the answers she has in mind. The union’s six founding members — Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands — are meeting Saturday in Berlin to plan a response, and Merkel invited the French and Italian leaders to Berlin for further talks early next week. The actual process of extricating the U.K. from the bloc is expected to take two years or more.

If history is a guide, resetting the EU so it responds more directly to its citizens will be a struggle.

Beset even before Friday’s result with internal tensions over the debt problems of weaker members and the flood of refugees reaching its shores, the EU’s core members have little political capital left to craft a compelling vision to inspire the remaining EU countries. Hollande’s political support is weakening and Merkel, still the bloc’s dominant leader, faces difficult elections next year.

‘Friend’s Funeral’

Even if the U.K. in the end is the only nation to exit, the EU it leaves will be diminished, less ambitious and restricted as hopes of transforming centuries of fractious European history fade.

“I felt as though I was at a friend’s funeral,” Latvian former President Vaira Vike-Freiberga said in an interview after the vote. “This is no longer the European Union that we joined.”

The lesson of the Brexit vote is that EU policy makers should focus on the crises for which “people want answers,” such as Europe’s flood of refugees, youth unemployment in southern Europe and national security, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Saturday.

“We don’t have a full set of answers on the table,” Steinmeier told reporters before meeting his five colleagues in Berlin. “We have to listen to each other and test the amount of expectations and leeway that the various member states have.”

Populist Danger

For now at least, the EU will probably survive in its current form minus the U.K., said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform in London and a veteran EU analyst. He noted that while opinion polls suggest hostility to the EU is rising across the bloc, they also indicate that in no other country would a majority currently vote to leave.

But EU unity will be more vulnerable to political or economic shocks, which could trigger pressure to leave those countries that the strongest protest parties on the left or right, such as Italy, he said.

“The danger of populism and extremism is huge,” Hollande said Friday.