For European leaders watching Theresa May’s political death throes, a sense of inevitability has been replaced by one of fear.
Rather than break the deadlock over Brexit, the departure of the British prime minister raises the prospect of what they’ve long considered their worst nightmare: a U.K. run by Boris Johnson, the man many inside the European Union blame for causing the mess with his campaign based on false promises and then by undermining his leader.
If May was predictable and her strategy clear, albeit flawed, many EU chiefs think of Johnson simply as a lying populist who wants to destroy the bloc. Privately, officials use his name as shorthand for a British government that would deliver, in their eyes, the most economically catastrophic form of Brexit – one without a U.K.-EU deal to smooth the departure.
As recently as April, when EU governments were discussing whether to allow the U.K. to postpone its exit from the U.K., officials in Brussels talked about ensuring they could “Boris-proof” the decision to prevent him disrupting EU business should he become premier.
Their concerns are long-held. In the month before the referendum on EU membership in June 2016, world leaders including President Barack Obama and then British Prime Minister David Cameron were gathering for a Group of Seven summit in Japan. In Britain, Johnson, a former mayor of London, was campaigning to leave the EU with his red bus emblazoned with the now discredited message that the U.K. sent 350 million pounds ($443 million) a week to the EU that could instead be spent on hospitals.
In the corridors of the summit, Johnson’s name was mentioned several times, a person familiar with the meeting said. Diplomats from across Europe were worried that his Brexit message was hitting home.
From Japan, Martin Selmayr, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s chief of staff and now the executive’s most senior civil servant, tweeted his worst-case prediction for the following year’s summit. He grouped Johnson with Donald Trump and leaders of French and Italian populist movements. “G7 2017 with Trump, Le Pen, Boris Johnson, Beppe Grillo?” he said. That’s the “horror scenario.”
With the EU sticking to its policy of a united front and isolating a belligerent, Brussels now faces a U.K. spiralling into deeper political turmoil. Rather than serve as a warning to supporters of nationalist forces across the continent, it’s only emboldened them during pivotal elections to the European Parliament.
Indeed, the Brexit Party founded by arch euroskeptic Nigel Farage was leading opinion polls before the British vote held on Thursday. Results are due on Sunday.
“In hindsight, failing to rebut the claim that the U.K. sent 350 million pounds per week to Brussels without drawing any benefit was a mistake,” Juncker told Austria’s Der Standard newspaper earlier this month. “So many lies were told.”