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Courtesy of the Times.
The European responses to the resounding defeat of Theresa May’s Brexit deal range from exasperation at the scale of her failure to fear for the future of British democracy. An apocalyptic mood on the other side of the Channel was most clearly expressed by Manfred Weber, a leading German MEP from Angela Merkel’s party, who said the priority was now to get the UK out of the EU at the end of the month so that the “British chaos” would not spread into Europe.
The verdict of the German press was scarcely less damning. Some newspapers blamed Mrs May for “frittering away” the EU’s concessions and tipping her country into a “national crisis” by recklessly inflating the expectations of the hardcore Brexiteers in her party. One dismissed her as an “inept tactician”.
Others warned that Europe’s goodwill had been “exhausted” and said it would be best to deny the British an extension to the Brexit deadline to put the nation out of its misery. Mr Weber, the leading candidate to replace Jean-Claude Juncker at the helm of the European Commission, described the mutinous disarray in terms usually reserved for an outbreak of infectious disease. He argued that permitting the UK to put off its departure would be a dangerous gambit for the EU. “On the European side we are clear: we cannot allow the British chaos to infect and worm its way into Europe,” he told ZDF, a German broadcaster. The news magazine Der Spiegel agreed. “Why the EU should agree to prolong this torment under the given circumstances is not immediately obvious,” it said. “Perhaps it would be better to block off this emergency exit for the British. “Then in a few days they would finally stand on the edge of the cliff and gaze into the abyss. You can be sure that they will not like what they see from this vantage point.”
’Again: no’. How the Flemish newspaper De Morgen reacted to Mrs May’s defeat Franziska Brantner, an MP for the German Green Party and its lead spokeswoman on Europe, said the Brexiteers’ calculation that the EU would cushion the blow of a no-deal Brexit had been sorely misguided. “As harsh as this may sound, we’re not going to do you this favour,” she said. Die Zeit, a German weekly, fretted that the endless deadlock could inflict irreparable damage on the British people’s faith in their political system. “For many decades Britain was considered a model of parliamentarianism,” its columnist wrote. “Out of all the world’s capital cities, you looked to London to see how democracy really worked . . . Now nothing is left of the glory of the past.
“The endless debates on Brexit have split the country, radicalised it and politically incapacitated it. Mutual trust in society has vanished. At the same time, the population is becoming increasingly disenchanted with its politicians.” In Italy, La Repubblica borrowed a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” The newspaper compared the turmoil in the UK to the self-confidence that oozed through the nation as it hosted the Olympic Games in London seven years ago. “This marvellous island has made us dream, from the Bard to the Beatles, from James Bond to Harry Potter,” the newspaper wrote in a front-page editorial. “But Brexit has transformed those dreams into a nightmare. A curse from which the United Kingdom appears unable to free itself, like an island trapped in a tempest.”
In Paris Didier Guillaume, the minister for agriculture and fisheries, said France was considering supplying state aid to fishermen banned from British waters in the event of a no-deal Brexit. “It would be dramatic because a lot of our fishermen fish in those waters and there is no possibility of them moving elsewhere,” he said.
