The conviction has been spreading among French people in recent days that les Britanniques have just elected Donald Trump. The papers are filled with meditations on British anxieties over lost empire, descriptions of Boris Johnson’s hair and the wildest speculations about what he might do as Prime Minister. Every squib about European overregulation that Johnson wrote during his stint as a Brussels correspondent for the Telegraph in the 1980s and 1990s has by now been vetted, stripped of its humorous intent and found wanting. Johnson exaggerated the threat of European regulations to prawn cocktail-flavoured crisps! Nowhere did he cite a single EU directive banning the large-sized condoms that an Englishman requires!
Though Johnson’s arrival is supposed to mark a new era in relations with the continent, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and other Brussels leaders are acting as if he has trampled on expectations. Le Figaro noted their objections, for instance, to ‘the manner in which he assembled his cabinet’. Europeans have grown so used to at least a consulting role on every continental decision, from Hungary’s immigration policy to Italy’s budget to Greece’s choice of leader, that it has become a prerogative.
Where do such attitudes come from? It is partly that most European newspaper readers and TV viewers are exposed to no pro-Brexit sentiment. Brexit gets explained to them by British people who hate it. So as Boris came to power, El País in Madrid published Timothy Garton Ash’s thoughts about how Jo Swinson betokened a ‘strange rebirth of liberal England’. The Roman daily La Repubblica obtained an exclusive interview with Tony Blair. ‘He won’t succeed in breaking the unity of the EU on Brexit,’ the former prime minister reassured readers. ‘That would be too great a humiliation for Europe.’ Blair helpfully put matters in an Italian context by saying that Johnson’s populism was more ‘dangerous’ than that of Matteo Salvini, the interior minister who leads the anti-immigration Northern League party, more dangerous even than that of Donald Trump.
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