The European Commission’s idea for a quick-fix solution to its Brexit problem is already being rejected by opponents as a weak gimmick.

Brussels hopes for a replay of its successful 1992 campaign to keep Denmark in the EU, by agreeing on legal reforms and opt-outs short of full-scale treaty change. The plan is to move quickly to meet U.K. demands for reforms on issues related to free movement of labor, British sovereignty, eurozone policy and competitiveness.

But Britain’s leading Out campaigners savaged the notion of a scaled-back “Danish model” for reforms, with one group saying that proposing anything less than treaty change amounts to “nothing more than a cynical PR ploy.”

The harsh criticism of the plans came during a crucial week for the U.K. referendum campaign, as Prime Minister David Cameron prepared to present his reform demands in writing to EU leaders, and diplomats girded for potentially drawn-out negotiations.

Officials in Brussels and on Downing Street want to expedite those talks so that a referendum can be held in 2016. But there are doubts about whether negotiations can be completed in time to hold a vote next year.

Another potential delaying factor emerged this week: The BBC reported Tuesday that the U.K. Electoral Commission has said that if the House of Lords decides to allow 16 and 17-year-olds to vote, it will need as long as a year to register them — potentially pushing back the referendum to late 2016 or 2017.

Diplomatic blitz

Cameron sent his Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, to Berlin Tuesday to share the first hints of his detailed reform proposals with Angela Merkel. The Out forces were quick to pounce on Osborne’s suggestion in a speech that “legally binding” opt-outs could be used to insulate the U.K. from existing EU treaty language promising “ever closer union.”

A leading U.K. Out campaign group, Leave.eu, expressed outrage that Osborne would settle for “desperate legal measures” instead of insisting on treaty change to get rid of the phrase.

Another Out campaign, Vote Leave, took aim at an idea floated by Downing Street last week to enshrine legal changes with the U.N. General Council in order to give them more weight.

“Registering any reform deal with the U.N. sounds superficially impressive but it does not give it any legal force,” the group said in a statement last week. “The Danish government tried this 20 years ago and it failed because unelected EU judges decided to ignore key parts of the package.”

Paul Stephenson, communications director of the Vote Leave campaign, claimed that even though the deal reached with Denmark, known as the the Edinburgh Agreement, was incorporated six years later into the subsequent Amsterdam treaty, key provisions were never added or were ignored.

Stephenson said one agreement with the Danes in 1992 — language clarifying that EU citizenship as defined in the Treaties does not “in any way take the place of national citizenship” — was ignored by the European Court of Justice in 2001, when it ruled that “Union citizenship is destined to be the fundamental status of the nationals of the member states.”

‘Anything is possible’

Both Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Secretary General of the Council Jeppe Tranholm-Mikkelsen were involved in crafting the Danish agreement in Edinburgh, which required unanimous agreement among EU leaders that it would be included in the next treaty. When the agreements were attached to the Amsterdam treaty in 1999, they were included as protocols and didn’t need to be ratified.

Juncker and Tranholm-Mikkelsen hope to replicate that model, according to an EU diplomat with knowledge of the negotiations.

“Denmark, after consulting with other member states, set forth the requests in writing, but they were themes, not specific,” the diplomat said, adding that the Commission has requested the same from the U.K. In other words, “they managed to renegotiate the Maastricht treaty without reopening the text.”

Despite the backlash in the U.K. debate over how much legal force an international agreement has compared to a treaty change, Danish politicians say they’re satisfied with the legal force of the agreement they made 23 years ago.

Holger K. Nielsen, a former chairman of the Danish Socialist party who had a critical role in the 1992 referendum, said at the time the “international law-based addendum” was not considered legally strong, but it succeeded in ensuring that Danes were exempt from the social union, an opt-out the British are demanding as well.

“It has worked quite well,” Nielsen said. “The issue that we had 23 years ago was we didn’t know how the EU would develop, we saw the EU as quite ideological at the time.”

“It could be a model when you have fear about development in the European Union and your population has a fear about that,” Nielsen said. “You put in some guarantees, but you decide yourself to stay out of it, and then you can get back in later.”

The Danes are even reconsidering some of their opposition to EU policies, and will hold a referendum in December on whether to opt-in to justice and home affairs policies so that the country can join Europol, the EU law enforcement agency.

“After all of those years, the Danish [opt-out] has been functioning,” said Bendt Bendtsen, a Danish MEP from the center-right European People’s Party. “No one can say the government did things they couldn’t do.”

Senior researcher Maja Kluger Rasmussen of Danish Think Tank Europa called promises of treaty change a “nice recipe for the U.K.,” but warned that the Danish negotiations were different. The Danes were not asking for changes that affected other countries, unlike the U.K.’s call for reform on the free movement of people and access to benefits for EU migrants.

“It can open Pandora’s box if the U.K. gets something that the other countries will ask for,” Kluger said. “It has an impact on other countries.”

Pro-EU campaigners in the EU say the mechanism for negotiations — whether Danish or not — is not as important as the outcome.

“It will be the substance of the reform, not what piece of paper it will be on,” said Laura Sandys, chair of the European Movement UK, which supports an In vote. “Inevitably the Out campaigns will declare it a failure before it’s even produced. Previous referendums show that anything is possible.”

This article was updated with the correct job title of Paul Stephenson, communications director of the Vote Leave campaign.

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