The result of the vote will not be known until Wednesday.
But there is hardly any suspense.
MEPs should broadly approve the trade agreement that the Europeans and London had managed to find on December 24, at the last minute.
“The right, the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Greens will vote for this agreement.
And other parliamentary groups will do it too, ”
confides a person close to the negotiations.
A diplomat, tired of the saga, decides:
"It's a non-event."
Read the file:
Brexit: our file to understand everything
However, the agreement marks the very last stage of Brexit,
"the culmination of a long series of debates and votes, which have marked out nearly five years since the June 2016 referendum in the United Kingdom",
as recalled the former chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, on Tuesday, in the European Parliament, before being given a standing ovation by MEPs.
Eyes on the future
During this debate, many speakers have deliberately chosen to place themselves in the aftermath.
As Angela Merkel did in 2017, when she declared that
"the future of the EU is much more important than Brexit".
Quoting the British poet William Wordsworth, the President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said nothing else:
"Let us learn from the past to benefit from the present, and let us learn from the present, to live better in the future. . "
According to a European source, Brexit would be little more than an old and bad movie.
“
Of course, some of the Member States, like Germany or the Netherlands, still have regrets in terms of economic interests.
But, overall, Europeans have digested the break. ”
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They are nevertheless far from having finished with this capricious and reckless neighbor.
"It does not happen of course a lot of subjects,"
admits a diplomat.
Anxious to mark its independence, the British government withdrew, at the beginning of the year, the full diplomatic status which the EU ambassador in London had previously enjoyed.
Brussels reacted by restricting the access of British diplomats to European institutions.
There were also those unflattering comparisons on vaccination, purposely stirred up by London.
But also the dispute - not settled - around the doses produced by AstraZeneca in the United Kingdom and which were to return to the EU.
Regardless, more than half of the UK population has received at least one dose of the vaccine, compared to 24% in the EU.
"They have done us a lot of harm,"
annoys a diplomat.
A bad start
Above all, there are unfulfilled commitments, which appear in black and white in the withdrawal agreement and the post-Brexit agreement which entered into provisional application at the start of the year.
"The British government should not take
(Tuesday's vote, Editor's note)
as a blank check or a blind vote of confidence,"
has also warned Luxembourg MEP Christophe Hansen (EPP).
The respect of the Northern Irish protocol, intended to avoid the return of a hard border between the two Ireland, is the first source of tensions between the two parties.
London has unilaterally decided to extend, until October 1, the moratorium on the re-establishment of certain customs controls between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, opening up breaches in the internal market.
Tensions between the communities have also arisen. “
They are due not to the Northern Irish protocol but to a poorly explained and poorly prepared Brexit. The British believed they could renegotiate the withdrawal agreement. They left the communities in uncertainty or in an illusion, ”
analyzes a diplomat. The letter of formal notice sent in mid-March to London has hardly changed things. Discussions are continuing laboriously.
On fishing, another sensitive subject, London also got off to a bad start, reluctant to apply the provisions provided for in the post-Brexit agreement and which have been in place since the provisional implementation of this agreement.
The dispute concerns the allocation of access licenses to the 6-12 nautical mile zone off the British coast.
Paris is not fading.
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To date, only 22 boats out of 120 from Boulogne-sur-Mer have obtained the precious sesame. To get it, fishermen must prove that they fished before entering UK waters. However, boats of less than 12 meters are not equipped with a geolocation system.
“The UK is expecting a number of financial services approvals from us. We will not give any until we have the guarantees that on fisheries and other subjects, the United Kingdom is respecting its commitments, ”
the Secretary of State for European Affairs, Clément Beaune
,
warned on Tuesday.
Other tensions are to come, especially when London will define its own social and environmental standards…
“Everything will depend on where they place the cursor in terms of regulatory independence. If they are aggressive, with massive state aid in certain sectors, we will have to react, ”
warns a good expert on the matter. The Europeans have settled Brexit. But the friction is not about to end.