‘We are also ready to listen’

Asked how he finally secured a stable Brexit deal with the UK almost seven years after it voted to leave the bloc, the EU commissioner Maroš Šefčovič has a simple answer: “strategic patience”.

Through years of deadlocked talks, legal action and threats by both sides, the veteran negotiator was always convinced that the EU and UK were destined to collaborate.

“What was very important for me was to simply — clearly — keep at the top of my mind that the UK-EU relationship is of strategic character,” he says from his 12th floor office at the European Commission’s Brussels headquarters. “A sort of strategic patience was absolutely required.”

Šefčovič has just moved in. Dubbed “Mr Fix-It” by commission staff for clinching the UK agreement, he is now applying his expertise to an equally profound challenge: pushing through the EU’s Green Deal legislation, one of the most ambitious pieces of environmental law in the world.

Despite the moniker, his approach is more about listening to others than doing it yourself. To seal the Brexit deal, he took stock of concerns on both sides of the Northern Irish border and from counterparts in Westminster. For climate law, he intends to tread a similar path.

“We need, I think, to demonstrate that we are ready not only to provide the recipes or advice or suggestions [for] how this should be done, but [that] we are also ready to listen,” he says.

This time, however, the partners testing his strategic patience are not external players but those within the EU. Rightwing politicians are calling for green regulation to be eased in the face of inflation and geopolitical tensions. Others say environmental rules will punish farmers and endanger food production. Both the French and Belgian premiers have called for a regulatory “pause”.

“I don’t know how you can make such arguments after the experience of last summer,” Šefčovič says, pointing to recent years in which extreme weather struck EU member states with damaging fires and floods simultaneously. 

Yet he is also convinced that implementing the law, which covers dozens of European Commission targets to reach net zero by 2050, must also account for the concerns of industry and households. “What we need is to really ponder over all measures we could do, all the steps we can undertake to work on . . . consolidating the public support for the Green Deal.”

Šefčovič, a burly Slovak who spent 10 years as a diplomat before turning to politics in 2009, can only hope his new partners are less intransigent than their predecessors: the government of Boris Johnson, which disowned the Brexit deal it signed after it came into force on January 1 2021.

Perhaps the biggest test of Šefčovič’s patience was the so-called “sausage wars”: a stand-off over the border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which exited the EU with the rest of the UK but remained in the EU’s single market for goods to avoid a trade border on the divided island of Ireland.

As part of the arrangement, the UK checked goods entering Ireland from Great Britain, imposing restrictions on traditional foods such as Cumberland sausages and Stilton cheese. The enraged Northern Irish unionists committed to the UK and London scrapped the checks, creating a potential breach in the EU’s single market.

The weeks that followed were chaotic. UK chief negotiator David Frost threatened to invoke Article 16: a contentious clause to unilaterally scrap large parts of the deal. Months of Friday meetings appeared to achieve nothing. Šefčovič warned of “serious consequences”. He took a risk by accepting British arguments the deal was too restrictive, and embraced a compromise: measures for smoother trade including a “green lane” for goods unlikely to enter the single market. But the UK wanted more.

By December, Frost had quit. His replacement, Liz Truss, only doubled down on threats to scrap parts of the agreement. Šefčovič hit back with a legal threat that could have hit the UK with costly fines.

With the UK insistent on leaving the EU and avoiding a hard border with Ireland, and the bloc’s 27 states anxious to protect the single market, it was an unenviable position. Šefčovič’s approach was to keep “meeting, exchanging positions, doing my utmost not to overreact publicly”, and, crucially, to “respect” his counterparts.

“People have very difficult jobs,” he says. “I never ever would [have] briefed negatively behind the back because it always gets to the addressee.”

In the end, patience paid off. Johnson, followed by his successor Truss, departed the prime minister’s office. They were replaced by Rishi Sunak, who opted to prioritise closer ties with Brussels, and an administration more amenable to the compromise put forward months before. Ultimately, that formed the basis of a deal.

A key moment came when James Cleverly — the new foreign minister with whom Šefčovič had struck up a rapport — said after several meetings, “now I believe that you don’t want to screw us”.

“It was never our intention,” Šefčovič replied. The result was the Windsor framework, announced on February 27 2023 by Sunak and commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

Throughout it all, Šefčovič, who was born in 1966 in Communist Czechoslovakia, said he prioritised peace in Northern Ireland, where a 1998 deal kept a fragile balance between unionists and republicans who favoured union with Ireland.

“Being born behind the Iron Curtain in a small country, I had a lot of sympathy for the situation in Northern Ireland and . . . on the island of Ireland,” he says. In the course of negotiations, he travelled to Belfast several times and listened to concerns on both sides. “I felt the responsibility that we cannot mismanage this one. We have to do it right”.

As he sits neatly across the table sipping Coke Zero, he praises the “excellent work” of commission civil servants, who often worked weekends and late evenings to get the deal done.

Many of his staff have worked with him for decades. Juraj Nociar, his chief of staff, has been with him for 13 years; his personal assistant Beata Podhorná for 21.

“He knows exactly — well, 99 per cent — what I think about things, what I would do, how I would react,” Šefčovič says of Nociar. “All this close partnership with your team makes your life much, much easier . . . they know when they need to consult me and when they need to work on their own.”

In his team, the joke is “you work with us until you are promoted,” he adds. It has expanded from 20 to 27 people since Šefčovič took on the sprawling Green Deal portfolio.

Incorporating energy, environment and climate policy, and balancing the demands of industry and rightwing politicians with the urgency of cutting emissions, it could prove to be one of his most challenging roles yet. The commission has already come under pressure for reconsidering whether it will push ahead on key chemicals legislation and ways to promote sustainable food.

For Šefčovič, losing momentum is not an option, although he is not unfamiliar with failure. In 2019, he ran for the Slovak presidency, only to lose out to Slovakia’s first female president Zuzana Čaputová in the second round vote.

It was a “very, very tough experience” but he is magnanimous about defeat. The next day he was called on by then-commission president Jean Claude Juncker to attend the Belt and Road Summit in China. “I didn’t have time to dwell on post-election depression because I was immediately dispatched.”

Another disappointment was standing aside to let Dutch politician Frans Timmermans lead the socialist group ticket to be European Commission president in the 2019 EU elections. In doing so, he hoped to show his political family were “a team”, Šefčovič says.

Timmermans instead became the EU’s climate chief, then left to run in Dutch elections. Šefčovič has taken on his colleague’s role, and with it his office, one floor below von der Leyen. The windows look out on EU institutions, the walls already decorated with family photos and paintings of Slovakia.

Taking on the green portfolio at such a contested time will require creative solutions. He recently tasked his team with coming up with ways to show that a nearly €90bn “social climate fund”, generated by revenues of the EU’s emissions trading system and earmarked for poorest households, will not end up as an “income source for the ministers of finance”.

Crucial to winning support, too, will be “structured dialogues” with industries most affected by new rules such as farmers, akin to his talks in Northern Ireland. “There are a lot of worries on the side of industry,” he says, acknowledging the citizens have endured a lot in recent years: Covid, the war in Ukraine, energy crisis in Europe.

The four-term commissioner, a former youth athlete who studied in Moscow in the late 1980s, had thought he might step down at the end of this mandate following EU elections in June next year.

But Šefčovič says if he has “a chance” to keep working on the Green Deal, “which is so crucial to Europe”, he would consider running again.

Even if does not work out, he adds, “I’ll definitely try to be useful”.