European press blames Brexit for UK political ‘insanity’

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Six years on from the Brexit referendum, continental commentators have become used to Westminster meltdowns, but many see in the latest cataclysm the finale of a project that was always divorced from reality.

For the French newspaper Lib?ration, there is “decidedly something rancid in the Tories’ tea”. The paper’s former London correspondent Sonia Delesalle-Stolper said Westminster, a “temple of democracy and ancient traditions”, had witnessed “bewildering” scenes.

“Blows, shoves, insults, resignations, tears … After some implausible incidents in both the Commons and Downing Street, the British government and the Conservative party seem to be on a path to total self-destruction,” she said.

Like most European papers, Lib?ration looked past the spectacle to what it saw as the root cause of the chaos. “In four months, the country will have had four chancellors, two interior ministers, and no doubt soon two prime ministers,” it said.

“Who will be Liz Truss’s successor, since her imminent departure is no longer in doubt? That’s the question. For Brexit – and its chief artisan, Boris Johnson – has successfully drained the Conservative party of all substance and competence.”

Of Wednesday’s events, Le Monde said Suella Braverman’s departure as home secretary and “concerns over the government’s direction” were clearly “bad news for Liz Truss, who is seeking to regain control after the huge tax cuts she had promised were shredded”.

More fundamentally, it also blamed Brexit. “British governments since Brexit have demonstrated with ever greater talent that leaving the EU only takes Britain further away from the promised land of recovered sovereignty and untrammelled freedom,” wrote Sylvain Kahn.

“‘Take back control!’, they said. But the British are a very long way from doing that. No other EU member is in such a state … Since Brexit, Britain’s Conservative leaders have done all they could to prove that EU membership was far from the problem.”

Annette Dittert, the London correspondent for the German public broadcaster ARD, noted that Truss was “now the third Conservative leader, after Theresa May and Boris Johnson, to fail to deliver on Brexit promises”.

She argued that future historians would find the roots of British politics’ “current insanity” in 2016. “Firstly, because Brexit has damaged the UK economy so lastingly that any extra market uncertainty leads to far greater turbulence than ever before. Secondly, because Brexit and the inherent magical thinking of a sovereign UK that can go its own way in the globalised 21st-century world, detached from international developments, marked the beginning of the end of rational thinking on the island.”

Truss’s “dramatic failure”, Dittert concluded, “could now spell the end of that wishful thinking – the beginning of something of a British turning point”.

In Die Zeit, Bettina Schulz said Truss’s imminent political demise could be a key moment. “The extreme ideological project of the neoliberal group within the Conservative party has failed,” perhaps heralding “one of the most important turning points in the country since the Brexit vote in 2016”, she said.

Jochen Buchsteiner took the same line in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Despite Brexit, there are limits to what a British government can do,” he said. “Policies that are – as a veteran Tory put it – ‘irrational nonsense’ remain unenforceable even after Brexit.”

In a comment article titled “And Britain broke” in Spain’s El Pa?s, ?ngel Ubide said the UK’s long tradition of “bureaucratic and diplomatic efficiency, and the advantage of a universal language” had given it “an aura of credibility”. But he continued: “Everything has its limit. The pro-Brexit coalition captured the British political establishment in 2016, and has slowly eroded that credibility until, as almost always happens, it suddenly ran out.”

La Vanguardia’s London correspondent, Rafael Ramos, waxed philosophical. “In literature and art, absurdism is the tendency to avoid the constraints of the logical, shun experience and reality, and give oneself over to the irrational and the arbitrary,” he wrote. “In politics, this is what we’re seeing in the UK, a country where the markets have intervened, a humiliated prime minister has had to perform a U-turn, and the de facto leader is the chancellor who has lost two party leadership elections.”

El Confidencial’s Celia Maza was blunter still, suggesting the UK was once again in danger of becoming “the sick man of Europe”. Truss “has been in Downing Street for just over a month, but her situation is totally unsustainable,” she said.

Denmark’s Politiken described an atmosphere of “chaos and panic”, while in Italy – to whose habitual political chaos the Economist this week compared the UK’s – Corriere della Sera concluded that however the saga ended, Britain’s credibility had collapsed.

Luigi Ippolito wrote that the debacle, compared by some to the Suez crisis and the end of Britain’s imperial ambitions, “has unmasked the post-Brexit illusion of being a totally sovereign nation that can ignore international realities. No one is an island any more.”