Angela Merkel has significantly stiffened her rhetoric on Brexit, telling an audience of German business leaders that any exception to the EU’s single market rules would represent “a systemic challenge for the entire European Union”. That made her subsequent statement that she also wanted British business to have the maximum opportunity to operate within the single market “problematic, to say the least,” he said. The four freedoms – free movement of goods, capital, services, and people – could not be decoupled, Muscat said. The idea that Britain can come back with a superior deal, or even the same deal, is not acceptable. Jens Spahn, a senior member of her Christian Democrat Union party, confirmed the tough line, including no pre-negotiations before article 50 is triggered.

Source: The Guardian October 05, 2016 16:18 UTC