Rejoicing in a neighbor’s mess is a very ugly feeling that does not lead to paradise. It is however difficult not to feel towards the English this bad inclination to which only the Germans have been able to find the adequate word of Schadenfreude, which we would laboriously translate into French as “perverse and unmentionable joy in the face of the misfortune of others”. The English – not the British as a whole, but the English in a very large proportion – wanted to leave us in 2016 after having gone out of their way to join us in 1973. All this to find out now, as they find themselves in the 1970s at the bottom of the hole, that they were finally happier with us. A great classic.
But how could this nation of merchants without faith or law that history textbooks usually qualify as “pragmatists” have been able to show themselves to be more naive and more ideological than all the Europeans put together, and even than the French? so quick to get carried away for any revolutionary nonsense? How could these brilliant inventors of parliamentary democracy have been fooled by Boris Johnson, who came to power as a cult guru, by making them swallow euphoric pills? Mystery.
When the British emerge from this black hole, they can tell themselves that they have at least served to produce future anthropologists a perfect sample of populism. They will have shown how easy it is to blind a rational people with delirious slogans and to damage an apparently solid democracy by leaving it groggy in the face of the damage of its sad passions and its illusory euphoria. Post coitum omne sad animal est, sive gallus et mulier, wrote a scholar of antiquity. After coitus, every animal is sad (“except the rooster and the woman”, he specified, but that’s another story). Boris Johnson, who likes to declaim his Latin in public, is well placed to know it, he is the maker of Brexit coitus.
Post-Brexitum, the return to reality is hard to live with. It has been almost seven years since they voted for their “independence”, and two years since they effectively regained it, on January 1, 2021, after years of twisted attempts to obtain the butter and the money of the EU from the butter – thus confirming (if need be) that they had no idea what they wanted when they voted to leave. Nothing is going well these days, but things are worse in the UK than in the EU. Paralyzing bureaucracy, falling trade, collapse of the health system, impoverishment, strikes. Since 2016, investment has been on the rise in all G7 countries except the UK. According to the British government’s economic forecasting body, Brexit alone would cost 4 points of annual GDP over the long term, when the free trade agreement with Australia would bring in less than 0.02 points. Big deal !
The Covid and the war in Ukraine have a good back. How could you have believed for a moment that turning your back on the largest market in the world located right on its border could strengthen its economy and its soft-power, in a world where only the great powers count? Yet it was written in the manual of populism, but at the bottom of the page and in small print: “Pumpkins are not carriages”. Even the rabbits understood that.
At Sunak and Starmer, the same fear of reality
A new breed was born: the “bregreters”. Those who regret Brexit are now 56%, according to YouGov. A late and completely useless awakening, except to satisfy our Schadenfreude. More worrying is that with Brexit a new breed of politicians has been born too. Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (No. 5 in Downing Street on the list of coitus cripples since 2016), but also his Labor opponent Keir Starmer are affected by the same symptom of populist “post coitum”: fear of reality and words to say it. Both have made “Brexit” a forbidden word to explain the derailment of the country. Sunak, because that would be denying his political religion and the God who made him. Starmer, because he fears to antagonize the Europhobes of Labour, including the neglected of the North whom the sirens of “Leave” had seduced. The act of self-harm committed with lies by the Conservatives nevertheless opens a avenue for the leader of Labor to be elected by 2025. That he does not even have the courage to affirm his principles and to denounce the Brexit is a very bad start. A Prime Minister elected on a taboo would prolong the populism he claims to be fighting.
Marion Van Renterghem is the winner of the Albert-Londres Prize, author of a biography of Angela Merkel and an autobiographical essay on Europe entitled “Mon Europe, je t’aime moi non plus” (Stock, 2019).