Italy
Italians have reacted angrily to the emerging view in the UK that British politics has reached Italian levels of chaos, claiming that Westminster is in a league of its own thanks to Brexit.
Outrage greeted the cover of the latest issue of The Economist, which featured the headline “Welcome to Britaly” and a cartoon of Liz Truss dressed as Britannia clutching a pizza instead of a shield and twirling spaghetti on a fork.
The weekly magazine claimed that Britain’s political instability, low growth and recent subordination to the bond markets showed that the comparison to Italy was “inescapable”.
Italy may have had nearly 70 governments since the Second World War and suffers low productivity but Italian commentators rushed to claim that Britain’s recent turmoil can be blamed on peculiarly British foolhardiness, starting with Brexit.
Everything that has happened since “has no parallels with Italy or any other country”, argued the leading daily Corriere della Sera.
The UK-based Italian journalist Barbara Serra tweeted: “The arrogance that led to the leap in the dark that was Brexit and the utter chaos that followed was very, very British.”
Amid Italian protest on social media, the economics professor Antonio Andreoni added: “Own your own mess.”
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Corriere della Sera recalled that Italy is the seventh-largest exporter in the world, while the UK is in 14th place after losing out in European markets due to Brexit, and the euro is seen as a far more reliable currency than sterling.
Using spaghetti to portray a sluggish economy was “the oldest of stereotypes”, Inigo Lambertini, the Italian ambassador to the UK, wrote in a letter of complaint to The Economist yesterday.
Italians have long been sensitive to publications using spaghetti to reinforce negative views of their country and were angered in 1997 when Germany’s Der Spiegel used a photo of a gun in a plate of pasta for an article about Italian crime.
In 2001, when Silvio Berlusconi was set to take office for the second time, The Economist argued he was “not fit” to lead Italy, prompting the Fiat patriarch Gianni Agnelli to retort: “We are not a banana republic.”
The Agnelli family became the single largest shareholder in The Economist in 2015.
Giorgia Meloni’s teething problems in forming a new government in Italy were sidelined on Italian news sites yesterday by the far greater political shenanigans in the UK.
In an article published hours before Truss stepped down, Corriere della Sera’s London correspondent wrote that Jeremy Hunt “appears to be the de facto premier”.
Russia
President Putin’s spokesman said this morning that Moscow was not expecting any “political wisdom” from the UK or any of its western allies.
“We cannot expect any insights or political wisdom from anyone in the West now... especially from Great Britain, where the current head of the executive is not elected by the people,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said.
He was answering a question about reports that Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, was eyeing a return to Downing Street.
On Truss, Moscow said Britain had “never known such a disgrace as prime minister”. A foreign ministry spokeswoman wrote on Telegram: “The catastrophic ignorance and the Queen’s funeral immediately after her audience with Liz Truss will be remembered.”
The state news agency RIA Novosti said Truss had been forced out after “a squall of criticism as a result of her new plan to support the economy, and fears that to realise it the government would increase the national debt”.
Ilya Goncharov, a Russian journalist based in London, told the independent Russian-language website Meduza that Truss’s growth plan had “provoked the indignation of Britons because it was mostly advantageous to the rich” and lacked independent analysis on the potential economic effects.
The Kommersant newspaper predicted that Rishi Sunak would be the frontrunner in the week-only Tory leadership contest.
Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president, referred to the Daily Star’s video stream featuring a head of lettuce to see if it would last longer than Truss as prime minister. “Bye, bye Liz Truss, congrats to lettuce,” he tweeted.
Germany
The German press initially reacted to Truss’s resignation with the air of zoo visitors watching a hungry polar bear on the loose in the seal enclosure, torn between concern, horrified fascination and relief at being on the safe side of the barriers.
“The chaos in Britain has reached perfection,” proclaimed the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper.
Asked about the challenges facing Britain, Annette Dittert, London correspondent for the ARD public broadcaster, managed only a weary laugh. “If we get going on that subject, we’ll still be here tomorrow morning,” she replied.
There was also a certain amount of frivolity. “The lettuce has won,” as one German social media personality put it. Bild, the country’s bestselling tabloid, hailed a “Brit-quake” after weeks of “Frus-Truss-ion” in Westminster.
Die Welt, the conservative newspaper, said Brexit was partly to blame for the crisis. “British politics has developed a self-destructive centrifugal force that should serve as a cautionary tale to all those still touting easy solutions to our current challenges. The truth is that the Tory party’s Brexit ideology is hollow. It consists of a handful of clever slogans that, to the misfortune of the British nation, have lingered on for too long. Liz Truss’s spectacular failure is the clearest example of this.”
Die Tageszeitung, the left-wing daily, wrote that the Conservatives were incapable of governing: “Whoever now wins the coming election to succeed Truss will face exactly the same problems: a dysfunctional party in which there is no consensus on the right policies and all the players hate each other. The only way forward now is to form an interim government, dissolve parliament and hold new elections. Competence in the election campaign — that will now be the yardstick.”
The news site of the magazine Der Spiegel said there was little chance of a political fresh start in the UK. “If the Tories really cared about the country they claim to serve, they would allow a general election. But their core strengths are clinging on to power and greed, so they have their claws into Downing Street. And that makes them blind to the damage they are doing to Britain and to themselves.”
Süddeutsche Zeitung, which sits on the centre left, wrote: “Liz Truss has done great damage to her country. She was elected leader of the Conservative Party in the summer on promises that were not only unrealistic but also dishonest … ”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote: “A few lessons should have stuck. Politics is more than slogans. The attempt to enforce the 40-year-old recipes of Margaret Thatcher with a crowbar in the midst of the crises of 2022 was ludicrous. Even leaving the European Union has not freed Britain from the dependencies of the world markets — on the contrary: the country has to battle the global economic upheavals on its own.”
Belgium
De Morgen wrote: “Truss leaves Brits in chaos. . . Is there anyone capable of leading divided Britons out of this pit?”
De Standaard found it “curious that politicians in a globalised world believe that a nation-state can meet all of its challenges”.
It added: “Finally, Britain learns that big bangs are not beneficial as a policy tool. Kwasi Kwarteng’s so-called mini-budget brought the financial and economic system to the brink of collapse. Even in the United Kingdom, therefore, sovereignty must be taken with a grain of salt.”
Netherlands
Trouw wrote: “Truss’s departure completes the chaos. . . Stability hardly seems to be expected from the Conservative Party for the time being.”
Volkskrant said: “Truss fiasco illustrates the lack of realism on the part of the right-wing Brexit wing of the Conservatives. In this crisis, the UK needs a capable and experienced centrist figure who can hold the country together. The European Union needs a stable partner. Although the British have left the EU, the struggle in Ukraine shows that they are indispensable to Europe from a military and geopolitical point of view. That is why the farce in Westminster must come to an end.”
France
President Macron expressed hope for a return to stability in the UK, although that appeared unlikely to commentators who concluded that Britain had gone “completely mad”.
Before an EU summit in Brussels, Macron said: “I hope that Great Britain can return to stability as quickly as possible and move forward. That is good for us, and it is good for our Europe.”
Marion van Renterghem, a respected television and press commentator, said the UK had gone “completely mad” and had become an “incredible mess”. She blamed the fiasco on Brexit, which she said had left the country “ungovernable”.
Alexandre Devecchio, a commentator for Le Figaro newspaper, compared the Conservative Party’s woes to those of the centre-right French Republicans, whose candidate, Valérie Pécressé, polled a pitiful 4.76 per cent of the vote in the spring presidential election.
He said both movements were in the throes of a “profound identity crisis and paying for their scorn of democracy.”
He added that Boris Johnson alone had “popular legitimacy”.
Spain
The left-leaning daily El País published analysis from its international editor, Lucía Abellán, who wrote: “The only positive lesson that can be gleaned from this crisis is that no leader should resort to fiscal fables for personal gain or to hold on to power.”
El País accused Truss of relying on “fiscal fables”
José M de Areilza, opinion writer for the conservative newspaper ABC, said that “the British prime minister has had no other choice but to resign after an unprecedented spectacle of bad governance”.
Many papers in Spain, including the leftist El Diario, focused on the lettuce stunt staged by the Daily Star. In a column titled “In the end the lettuce won”, the paper wrote that “Truss had quit after just six weeks in the role after losing her authority in her party, trapped by internal criticism”.
The right-leaning online daily El Español pointed to the picture of Truss meeting Queen Elizabeth, calling it the “cursed photo: Elizabeth II survived two days, and the prime minister, 45”. It added that her resignation was inevitable because “the accumulation of errors in the few weeks that her time in the role lasted all pointed to this ending”.
Europe
EU leaders expressed hope that relations might improve.
The Irish prime minister, Micheál Martin, agreed that a lot was at stake. “Stability is very important,” he said. “Given the fairly significant geopolitical issues facing Europe [like] the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis.”
Michel Barnier, who negotiated the terms of Brexit on behalf of the EU, said he took no pleasure in Britain’s discomfiture. “No one should or can be happy about the political and economic turmoil in the UK,” he tweeted. “We must find stability and co-operate, across Europe.”
United States
President Biden vowed to continue close co-operation with Britain. “The United States and the United Kingdom are strong allies and enduring friends — and that fact will never change,” he said in a statement.
“I thank Prime Minister Liz Truss for her partnership on a range of issues including holding Russia accountable for its war against Ukraine. We will continue our close co-operation with the UK government as we work together to meet the global challenges our nations face.”
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During Truss’s brief tenure as prime minister she travelled to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, where she met Biden — days after he had criticised the low-tax “trickle-down economics” she was trying to enact.
Only last weekend he issued an incredibly rare rebuke of an ally’s domestic policies, saying he was not the only one who thought the government’s original mini-budget had been a “mistake”.
Biden told reporters at an ice cream shop: “I think that the idea of cutting taxes on the super wealthy at a time when — anyway, I just think — I disagreed with the policy, but that’s up to Great Britain to make that judgment, not me.”
China
The foreign ministry declined to comment on Truss but Hu Xijin, a former editor-in-chief of the state newspaper Global Times, called her resignation a joke.
“A prosperous era won’t have oddities such as this. The entire Britain is in a fragile position, and the elite of UK politics these days are a bunch of opportunists without the bottom line, who are only interested in registering eyeballs and winning the election,” Hu said. “It looks like this country will be in turmoil for a while, and any good idea won’t have a good way to be spread across the country.”
China’s state media, as expected, mostly devoted their coverage to the Communist Party congress. The People’s Daily, the flagship party newspaper, made no mention of Truss on its front page or international section.
Social media users joked that Truss had lost to a head of lettuce, expressed amazement at her extremely short term and sneered at the chaos in Downing Street.
China’s foreign ministry is unlikely to comment on Truss’s departure because it practises a non-interference policy, but state media are likely to use the quick turnover as proof of political instability and incompetence in the UK.
Beijing was wary of Truss’s hardline approach to China during her campaign and, upon her election, cautioned that any hyping of the “China threat” would be irresponsible and would not solve the UK’s own problems.
