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The House of Commons has voted and, three-and-a-half years after the Brexit referendum, the U.K. will officially leave the European Union on January 31.

But nothing has been solved and, for some time, nothing will change. Come February 1, the U.K. will be faced with the same reality it confronted last year: the EU is a tough nut to crack.

Britain will remain in the EU, for all practical purposes, until December. In this so-called transition period, it will have the same rights and will be subjected to the same laws and regulations as the other 27 member states, except that it won’t have any say in EU decisions.

And, as they have done since 2016, the two sides will be negotiating again, this time on the shape of their future relationship. This will unfold with the usual mixture of brinkmanship, bluff, media leaks, and tough closed-doors negotiating sessions on trade and other economic ties.

Formally, the parties will have 11 months to conclude a deal. That will be near-impossible if the idea is to conclude a comprehensive treaty that would keep the two markets as integrated as possible. But in reality, the two sides will only have five months to get serious: the U.K. would have to decide before July whether it wants to request an extension of the transition, which can be for up to two years.

This five-month period will be shortened further by the fact that before proper talks can start, EU Brexit czar Michel Barnier will have to obtain a formal negotiating mandate from the EU’s government, which will be hard to do before the end of February. That leaves four months at most.

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised during last December’s electoral campaign that he would never ask for an extension. Since then, he even had the House of Commons put that pledge into law. So yet again, just as last year, the U.K. finds itself in a self-created predicament in its dealings with Europe. The quicker the deal, the less it can cover.

Or, as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said this week during a trip to London to kick-start the Brexit talks with Johnson: “Without an extension of the transition period beyond 2020 you cannot expect to agree on every single aspect of our new partnership. We will have to prioritize.”

Four months of hurried talks are unlikely to provide the basis for a comprehensive trade treaty covering all dimensions and dealing with all the complexities of undoing more than four decades of commercial and trade integration. Meanwhile, forget about services: London seems to have given up on fighting for the most vibrant sector of the U.K. economy, and a bare-bones treaty could only cover goods.

Some on the European side remember that Johnson had promised to “die in a ditch” before requesting a Brexit extension last year, as the October 31 deadline loomed. Then he asked for one, and went on to an astounding political resurrection in the December general election.

Whatever happens before June, the one certainty is that the EU can afford to run down the clock. It can then either offer a limited trade deal at the last minute, which would hurt many sectors of the U.K. economy, or engage in a more ambitious negotiation if Johnson relents and agrees that serious talks between serious governments require more attention and time.