Sunak puts pressure on Northern Irish unionists to accept the agreement with the European Union

One of the most hackneyed, and at the same time truest, phrases about politics says that the key to success is managing time.

Rishi Sunak has understood.

Early this Tuesday, the British Prime Minister was already in Belfast.

He first explained on local radio the advantages of the agreement signed the day before with Brussels to solve the problems derived from the Northern Ireland Protocol.

He would then meet with Northern Irish workers and businessmen to convince them, with the enthusiasm of the entrepreneur who sells his

, of the opportunities that were about to open up.

“If we can get this deal done, Northern Ireland will be the most exciting economic area in the world,” he promised.

All this, just a few hours after a marathon day in which he had received the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in Windsor.

Both had closed the pending fringes of the agreement;

they had jointly presented it to the rest of the world.

And Sunak ended the day with almost three hours of debate in the House of Commons on the so-called Windsor Framework Agreement.

Not a meeting, not an exchange of words, with the Northern Irish unionists of the DUP or with the eurosceptics of the Conservative Party, the two forces that could derail the biggest effort to date to right relations between the United Kingdom and the European Union.

“This is not about me or about a particular political party,” Sunak responded when asked if he would go ahead with the deal if the DUP did not back it.

“This is about achieving what is best for the citizens, communities and businesses of Northern Ireland.

And what we have agreed makes a huge positive difference for all of them”.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, on Monday in Windsor.DPA via Europa Press (DPA via Europa Press)

Sunak has promised to put the new pact with Brussels to a vote in the House of Commons.

He has not set a date, and nothing suggests it will be this week.

He wants both unionists and eurosceptics to have time to inspect it in detail and, at the same time, take the debate out of a political bubble with a tendency to quickly poison itself every time it addresses Brexit and take it to society, where the reception has been positive.

And thus transfer the pressure to the side of the reticent.

The prime minister raises the agreement as something already definitively closed.

At the suggestion of the unionists that new changes be made to the text, the response has been emphatic: "We are willing to hold further conversations with all the parties that have any doubts about how what has been agreed works in practice, and in fact it already we have done it extensively before it was announced ”, said a Downing Street spokesman, to make it clear that there is no room for tweaking even a comma.

Unionism's dilemma

The prime minister has spent hours exchanging information and talking with the DUP, the formation that has kept Northern Ireland's self-government institutions blocked for a year and has so far demanded drastic changes in protocol.

"There has been obvious progress, but we continue to have some concerns," Jeffrey Donaldson, the leader of the formation, explained to the BBC on Tuesday.

"We will continue to examine the legal text, we will study it from top to bottom and we will communicate our decision," he said.

It's not so much, however, the search for hidden surprises in the agreement as the need to build consensus within the union community that holds Donaldson back.

Advances such as the so-called "Stormont brake", which allows the Autonomous Assembly of Northern Ireland to have a say and a certain veto right in new EU legislation that affects that territory, have been well received by unionism, and satisfy some of its key demands.

But Donaldson, who cemented his political career by defecting from the Reverend Ian Paisley's Ulster Unionist Party in protest at the Good Friday Agreement cessions, knows that in that community nothing sells worse than a conciliatory leader, willing to compromise with the government. From london.

“I am afraid that the agreement falls far short of satisfying all our demands.

At least, that's what my instinct tells me”, said deputy Ian Paisley, son of the historic reverend, at the head of the rebel faction of the DUP.

"Unfortunately,

The problems are not only within the DUP.

In the unionist community, Jim Allister, the founder of Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), which caused the fragmentation of the Protestant vote in the 2022 regional elections, has attacked the Sunak agreement.

“It does not seem enough to me for the unionists to accept it and give up their ability to pressure, by not returning to the Assembly.

And if on top of that what we get in return is for Sinn Féin to occupy the position of chief minister, no thanks," Allister said.

In local elections in May 2022, Sinn Féin – for decades the political arm of the IRA terrorist organization – won a historic victory.

Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, its candidate, Michelle O'Neill, was to have held the chief minister's chair, and the DUP would have been appointed a deputy chief minister.

The unionists, however, decided to block the formation of the Government with the excuse of the protocol.

Now Sinn Féin, along with other Northern Irish groups, has joined the pressure for the DUP to accept the Windsor Framework Agreement.

“I welcome this breakthrough [the agreement with the EU].

We already have a new pact.

My message is that we must seize the moment created.

The priority must be to get the Stormont Assembly up and running without delay,” O'Neill wrote on Twitter.

I have spoken with @RishiSunak by telephone.

I welcomed yesterday's breakthrough.

The deal is now done.

My key message is to let's keep momentum going.

The priority must now be getting Stormont up and moving without delay.

— Michelle O'Neill (@moneillsf) February 28, 2023

The weight of the eurosceptics

Sunak has not been given a break.

Upon returning to London, after the lightning trip to Belfast, he has met with the 1922 Committee, which brings together all Conservative deputies who do not hold any position in the Government.

They are called

(literally, those on the back seats) and their independence gives them unusual strength when it comes to opposing the Government.

The prime minister, according to some witnesses, has had a warm reception.

Most Conservative MPs have welcomed a deal that ends a confrontation with the EU at enormous economic and political cost.

However, the so-called European Research Group (ERG), the internal current that brings together eurosceptics, must also meet.

For now, he has commissioned his legal advisors to take the time to analyze the agreement in detail.

But the strength of the ERG is no longer what it was a few years ago, when it held the future of a prime minister like Theresa May in its hands.

Their criteria and decision regarding the Northern Ireland Protocol or the new Windsor Framework Agreement depend a lot on what Northern Irish unionism finally says, which they look askance at.

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