Brexit ett faktum, vilka är konsekvenserna?

PARIS — Either the U.K. changes its tune or the EU won't change the Brexit deadline, a senior French official warned Wednesday.

Only a "political change" in Britain, creating the possibility of a "different dialogue," would justify an extension of the October 31 Brexit deadline, France's state secretary for European affairs, Amélie de Montchalin, told a parliamentary hearing on Wednesday.

"If new elections, if there’s a new referendum, if there is a political change that leads us to think that we could have a different dialogue than the one we are currently having, an extension request can be discussed," de Montchalin told a National Assembly hearing.

"But giving more time in the same exact conditions we see, it doesn’t give lots of hope that things will go differently," she said. "It’s not three more months that will resolve the complexity of the problem. On the other hand, what can help us is if we have other interlocutors, or that they carry a more aligned position between what the parliament says, what the population thinks and what the government says."

It was Macron who, almost single-handedly, pressured his fellow leaders at a summit in April into offering the U.K. only a short-term extension until October 31, while others, including European Council President Donald Tusk, wanted a long delay of a year or more.

But for many in Brussels, Macron remains the biggest wildcard. That is largely because France is viewed as having perhaps the most to gain politically from the U.K.'s departure.

"It's just a carrot-and-stick strategy where the French play the stick,” a second EU official said.

The second official said Berlin is playing the role of carrot — a potentially alarming prospect for London given the unhappy phone call on Tuesday between Johnson and Merkel that prompted a British official to conclude a Brexit deal could never be reached.