(*This opinion / analytical article was written by Ivan Dikov for The European Views website.)

In the three-and-a-half years since the Brits voted to leave the Union, the opportunity cost from the Brexit process has been enormous – for the EU, for the UK, and for the entire West.

At the beginning, due to its absurdity, the whole Brexit mess used to be getting more and more fun by the minute.

Even the name itself – Brexit (Britain + Exit) – sounded cool and thrilling when that neologism started making headlines more regularly. Like the possibility of an apocalyptic science fiction scenario (an all-out nuclear war, an alien invasion, etc.) – you know it won’t happen, or at least you put all your hopes into its not happening, and, yet, in a weird way you still enjoy discussing it, imagining how it would go down, or pondering what the world would be like after it.

Likewise, it’s always entertaining at first when something utterly ridiculous gets underway in politics. But that just at the beginning. Then entertainment quickly yields way to alarm, panic, and, if that state of emergency drags of for too long, eventually utterly disinterested fatigue.

That has now become the case with Brexit, the aptly named departure of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union.

With the nearing of the current Brexit date of October 31, 2019, a deadline pushed back twice already, basically thanks to the mercy of the EU, the quagmire of Britain’s domestic politics seems to be getting even worse.

Except perhaps for reporters obliged to cover Brexit to make a living, most people might have lost interest in the ping-pong between the UK’s Brexiteer Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the British Parliament, and in the dealings with the EU of the country governed by those two.

So much so that the Brexit process has reached a point where any potential benefits of a withdrawal deal, the so called orderly Brexit, have become eclipsed or even negated by the sheer delay and the inability of the British political class to unite around any kind of a single position in a decisive fashion…

Read the rest of this article on The European Views website here

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