Press

"Chances are many people will have forgotten the details by the time we get there," said Ian Bond, director of foreign policy for the pro-EU Centre for European Reform based in London. "But they probably will strengthen that populist sense which the campaign to leave the EU is tapping into that you have a political elite that lives in a different world from ordinary people and I think that is potentially quite damaging to the remain side."

Rem Korteweg, del CER —un think tank londinense— se hace eco de las encuestas y apunta que el no holandés “es probable”. Y tendrá consecuencias: “Minaría la relación entre la UE y Ucrania, daría al presidente ruso Vladímir Putin una victoria inmerecida y avivaría los populismos a lo largo de Europa”, subraya.

The awkwardness for Prime Minister Mark Rutte is that while the Dutch Parliament has ratified the agreement, an instrument of ratification must be deposited with the European Union in Brussels for it to be legal. This gives legal space to the referendum, said Rem Korteweg, a Dutch analyst with the CER. If Dutch voters oppose the deal against the vote of their duly elected Parliament, as they are currently expected to do, Mr Rutte "will have to find a middle road," Mr Korteweg said. After all, he noted, the Netherlands currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Council.

They cannot find it within themselves to say anything nice about the EU. They have to reform it first. This is what David Cameron, the British prime minister, did in Brussels in February. It is no coincidence that the best known pro-European think-tank in the UK is called the Centre for European Reform.

The CER report is strongest on the real (nonfinancial) economic issues. The most contentious point here is whether the British economy is held back in some way by red tape imposed by Brussels or by European treaty obligations.It is very hard to find any such stifling effect in the data. The CER points out that product- and labor-market regulation in the UK are closer to that of the United States than to Western Europe, and the same broad pattern emerges from the OECD’s assessment of barriers to entrepreneurship.

"What has changed is that over the past year, eurozone governments have started to openly question" the wisdom of Brussels and Berlin's policy strictures, said Simon Tilford of the CER. In Portugal, Finance Minister Mario Centeno, who has a PhD in Economics from Harvard University, is introducing income tax and sales tax cuts, tax rebates, new subsidies for household energy bills and restoring government workers' pay that was cut. Those steps, he says, will stimulate consumption.

“Greece has effectively been asked to build an asylum system in two weeks,” says Camino Mortera, a research fellow for the Centre for European Reform and a specialist in EU law. “The EU claims there won’t be returns en masse but if you are not able to process people in a regulated fashion, how else are they going to deal with this?”