The European Union has agreed to grant Britain a new Brexit delay until Jan. 31 next year, EU Council chief Donald Tusk said in a Twitter post on Monday, just three days before the UK was due to exit the bloc.

“The EU27 has agreed that it will accept the UK’s request for a Brexit flex tension until 31 January 2020,” Tusk said of the idea of a “flexible extension”, which means Britain could go earlier if its fractious parliament ratifies the divorce bill.

The bloc now awaits an approval from London. Once that is in, a 24-hour countdown will start when member states can still object or else the decision will have been taken.

“This will allow for the decision to be formally adopted tomorrow,” an EU diplomat said.

An EU official warned, however, it might take as long as Wednesday, just a day before Britain would otherwise be due to leave the bloc on its current Oct. 31 deadline.

The decision came following a 30-minute meeting of the 27 EU ambassadors in Brussels after France dropped its objections that blocked the decision last week. Any delay to Brexit can only be granted unanimously by the 27 EU countries staying on together.

“The prospect of elections has strengthened significantly over the weekend,” a source close to French President Emmanuel Macron said earlier on Monday.

The third postponement of Brexit would come with conditions. They include a refusal to renegotiate their divorce agreement and giving a green light to the 27 capitals to meet without Britain to discuss the bloc’s future.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government on Sunday stepped up pressure on UK lawmakers to back an early election to break the impasse on Brexit three years after Britons voted to leave the EU.

A Downing Street source said the government would consider options including those proposed by opposition parties, after the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Liberal Democrats (LD) said they wanted a new poll on Dec. 9.

The delay envisages that Britain could also be out on Dec. 1 or Jan. 1, should parliament ratify the withdrawal agreement in November or December, respectively.

The bloc might ask London to name a candidate for the EU’s new executive European Commission, which is comprised of one representative from every member state and currently due to takeover on Dec. 1.

More than three years after Britain voted to quit the EU, the country and its parliament remain divided over how, when and even whether to leave.

The matter has triggered a spiralling political crisis in the country where Johnson is now sparring with the House of Commons over calling an early election.

For the EU, the unprecedented loss of a member is a historic setback. But the 27 are also fed up with the intractable divorce, which is sapping time, energy and political capital that should be spent on jump-starting their economies and tackling security and other challenges.

(REUTERS)

Members of Portugal’s new parliament took up office on Friday, among them the country’s first black women lawmakers who campaigned on promises to fight racism and inequality.

The three women, who all trace their origins to Guinea-Bissau, an impoverished former Portuguese colony in west Africa, won office in the October 6 general election when Prime Minister Antonio Costa’s Socialists were re-elected but without an absolute majority.

A total of 89 women were elected — an unprecedented number in the 230-seat parliament — following a new gender parity law requiring that 40 percent of elected lawmakers are female.

Portugal has a significant minority population from its former African colonies in Angola, Mozambique, Sao Tome and Principe, Guinea Bissau, and Cape Verde as well as Brazil.

Campaigners complain of discrimination in areas ranging from education to housing, employment to the justice system and of a shortage of black faces in business, the media and politics, although progress has been made in recent years.

After taking office in 2015, Costa, who is of Indian descent, nominated Portugal’s first black cabinet minister, appointing Francisca Van Dunem, who was born in Angola, as justice minister.

She is keeping the post in Costa’s new cabinet which will be sworn in on Saturday.

The best known of the newcomers is Joacine Katar Moreira, 37, an anti-racism activist who moved to Portugal from Guinea-Bissau when she was just eight and headed a list of upstart eco-socialist party LIVRE, or “FREE”, winning the new formation’s first and only seat in parliament.

The others are Romualda Fernandes, a 65-year-old lawyer and migration expert who won a seat representing the Socialists and Beatriz Gomes Dias, 48, the president of anti-racism association Djass, who ran with the far-left Left Bloc party.

Djass has proposed a memorial honouring the millions of African slaves which Portuguese ships transported to the Americas. The project has become a lightning rod for debate about the country’s colonial past.

Up until now the only black person to serve as a member of parliament since Portugal returned to democracy in 1974 was a man — Helder Amaral who represented the conservative CDS party between 2002 and 2019.

Moreira, who became a Portuguese national in 2003, vowed during her victory speech to become the voice of “anti-racism” and “leftwing radical feminism” in parliament.

Thousands of people have signed an online petition demanding that she not be allowed to take up her seat because at her victory celebration, several people were seen waving flags from Guinea-Bissau instead of Portugal.

“This has always been a war for people like me,” Moreira tweeted in response to the petition.

Source: AFP

Prime Minister Boris Johnson called on Thursday for a general election on Dec. 12 to break Britain’s Brexit impasse, a goal the leader has sought but so far failed to push through parliament.

Johnson said in a letter to opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn he would hand parliament more time to approve his Brexit deal but that lawmakers must back a December election, Johnson’s third attempt to try to force a snap poll.

Just a week before Britain was due to leave the European Union, the bloc looked set to grant Johnson a Brexit delay, something he has repeatedly said he does not want but was forced to request by the country’s divided parliament.

An election is seen by his team as the only way of breaking the deadlock over Brexit after parliament voted in favour of his deal, but then, just minutes later, rejected his preferred timetable which would have met his Oct. 31 deadline.

But he has twice failed before to win the votes in parliament for an election, where he needs the support of two-thirds of its 650 lawmakers. The main opposition Labour Party has repeatedly said it will only back an election when it is sure that he cannot lead Britain out of the EU without a deal.

“We will make available all possible time between now and 6 November for the WAB (Withdrawal Agreement Bill) to be discussed and voted through … this means we could get Brexit done before the election on 12 December,” Johnson wrote in a letter to Corbyn, posted on Twitter.

“But if parliament refuses to take this chance and fails to ratify by the end of 6 November, as I fear it will, then the issue will have to be resolved by a new parliament.”

More than three years after voting 52%-48% to be the first sovereign country to leave the European project, the future of Brexit is as unclear as ever with Britain still debating when, how or even whether it should go ahead.

Johnson won the top job in July by staking his career on getting Brexit done by Oct. 31, though he is almost certain to fail to do that after parliament defeated his proposed legislative timetable on Tuesday.

Several of his aides think he can weather any criticism for failing to meet the deadline at an election by arguing that he was thwarted by lawmakers, doubling down on his pre-election narrative pitting the “people versus the parliament”.

At a meeting of his political cabinet of top ministers, there was disagreement over whether the government should try for an early election, fearing that going to the polls before Brexit was settled might damage the governing Conservatives.

But, with another Brexit delay in the offing, local media reported there was eventual agreement that a new election was the only way forward to try to re-set the parliament, which voted down Johnson’s predecessor’s deal three times.

Labour has long said it cannot back an election until a so-called no deal Brexit is off the table. But if the EU grants an extension until the end of January, that would appear to remove the threat of Johnson taking Britain out of the bloc without an agreement.

Leave with Johnson’s deal

Earlier, a senior Downing Street source said Britain would ultimately leave the EU with Johnson’s deal despite the likely additional delay, with the EU considering offering London a three-month flexible Brexit extension.

“This ends with us leaving with the PM’s deal,” the Downing Street source said on condition of anonymity. “We will leave with a deal, with the PM’s deal.”

The timing of any election was also going to be determined largely by the EU and its decision on the length of any extension: Berlin supports a three-month delay, while Paris is pushing for a shorter one.

While both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron appear to be fatigued by Brexit, they fear a no-deal exit that would almost certainly hurt global growth, roil financial markets and create a potentially deeper EU crisis.

To offer Britain a long extension would take the pressure off British lawmakers to approve Johnson’s deal and open up possibilities such as a referendum on it. A short extension might focus minds in the British parliament.

Brexit was initially supposed to have taken place on March 29 but Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May was forced to delay twice – first to April 12 and then to Oct. 31 – as parliament defeated her Brexit deal by margins of between 58 and 230 votes earlier this year.

Johnson was forced by parliament on Saturday to send a letter to European Council President Donald Tusk requesting a delay until Jan. 31. He did so reluctantly, sending an unsigned photocopied note, but the correspondence was accepted.

“Our policy remains that we should not delay,” Johnson told parliament on Tuesday after parliament defeated his extremely tight legislative timetable for ratifying the deal he clinched in Brussels a week ago.

(REUTERS)