May expects tough EU divorce talks

London/Brussels - May repeated her insistence that no deal would be better than a bad deal

British Prime Minister Theresa May expects divorce talks with the European Union to be tough, she said on Sunday after EU leaders agreed stiff terms and voiced alarm at "illusions" in London that may wreck a deal.
"What this shows, and what some of the other comments we've seen coming from European leaders shows, is that there are going to be times when these negotiations are going to be tough," May told the BBC a day after her EU peers agreed on demands they want met to avoid chaos when Britain leaves the bloc in 2019. At Saturday's Brussels summit of the 27 other EU states, EU chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker accused unnamed pro-Brexit figures of underestimating the complexity of the task and German Chancellor Angela Merkel repeated her concern that London still harboured "illusions" about negotiating a quick free-trade pact.
May, who has called an election for June 8 in the hope of strengthening her position, repeated her insistence that no deal would be better than a bad deal - a position many in Brussels view as bluff, arguing that the legal void that would dawn on March 30, 2019, would hurt Britain much more than the others. But Juncker, quoted on Sunday by Germany's FAS newspaper, highlighted growing fears that the two sides are talking past each other, raising a significant risk of negotiations collapsing.
"I'm leaving Downing Street 10 times more sceptical than I was before," the Frankfurt paper quoted the the European Commission president as saying after he and chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier met May in London over dinner on Wednesday.
Juncker had arrived hefting two weighty EU treaties - last year's 1,600-page CETA free-trade pact with Canada and the 2012 EU accession of the bloc's newest member, Croati.