Citizens count Brexit's personal cost
Frustrated by Brexit negotiations, angry at Brussels or simply afraid of the future, ordinary Britons and other Europeans are already taking life-changing decisions a year before Britain leaves the EU. Office workers, farmers and radio hosts are taking on new nationalities, relocating their businesses or looking forward to lucrative alternative trade deals, as politicians struggle to come up with a plan.
"Other people my age, they are starting settling down, they make more long-term plans with their lives," said 32-year-old Matt Davies, a British expat in Madrid. "It's very difficult for me to plan anything beyond March 2019 because you just have no idea what is going to happen," the call centre worker said.
British and EU diplomats resumed negotiations in Brussels last week and are hoping to agree next month on a post-Brexit transition period. But the shape of future relations between Britain and the EU is far from certain and the British government is deeply divided over how to proceed.
That uncertainty is even more pressing for the three million EU nationals living in the UK, many of whom are now questioning their future there. Brexit affects "every part of our lives", radio presenter Gosia Prochal, one of nearly a million Polish citizens living in Britain, told AFP.
The 25-year-old is based in Peterborough, a city in eastern England that has seen a sharp rise in immigration in recent years and voted 61 percent in favor of leaving the EU in the 2016 referendum.
AFP spoke to five EU nationals and five Britons in the UK, as well as five British citizens living in continental Europe about their hopes and fears ahead of the expected Brexit date of March 29, 2019. William Lynch, from Northern Ireland, farms oysters in Lough Foyle.
He faces having to move his business two kilometers downstream to the Republic of Ireland, across a currently invisible boundary, if customs tariffs come in after Brexit. "I can't really leave it till the last minute to do that," the 63-year-old ex-fireman said.
The oysters he lays down this year, largely for export to France, will not be harvested until after the UK has left the EU.
