But it is Britain, which, by accepting Brexit eight years ago, plunged itself into the economic abyss from which it is still struggling to climb out, that has created a modern template for the self-destruction of a glorious old democracy.
British voters on Thursday overwhelmingly denounced the Conservative Party for giving birth to Brexit in 2016. In one of the country’s most one-sided general elections, the Labour Party won more than three times as many seats as the Conservatives. After 14 years in opposition, Labour returned to power on Friday, installing its leader, Keir Starmer, as prime minister. Starmer’s candidacy brought with it the virtues of discipline and refraining from promising.
A new report from think tank Cambridge Econometrics says the Brexit disaster means the Conservative party deserves a long banishment, with nearly $400 billion expected to drain from the UK economy by 2035 – a significant sum for a country whose annual gross domestic product is smaller than that of California.
Britain’s landslide victory wasn’t just about Brexit. After 14 years in power, the Conservative Party left plenty of good reasons to vote no, and it’s fair to wonder whether a party founded in 1834 can survive as a major political force. Under their watch, London’s prime ministerial office at 10 Downing Street was inhabited by an indigestible culture warrior (Theresa May), who was succeeded by an economically illiterate bombast (Boris Johnson).
Truss lasted seven weeks in office, and was replaced by Rishi Sunak, whose policy failures could not reverse the damage caused by his predecessors. According to the Resolution Foundation, a London think tank, if wages had risen at the same rate as in the United States and Germany since 2010, during a period of historic wage stagnation, the average British worker today would be earning about $4,600 more a year.
In a rational world, Britain’s poor performance would have a punitive effect on other countries, deterring them from taking reckless risks like Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, who first instigated a referendum because he was convinced that Brexit would not pass.
But the world is not rational. As President Emmanuel Macron demonstrated last month by calling early elections for the French National Assembly after his centrist coalition suffered a crushing defeat in the European Parliament elections at the hands of the populist, migrant-attacking National Rally. Macron’s folly was a stunning miscalculation, as was Cameron’s reckless gamble on the Brexit vote to silence the far-right Britain Firsters and EU attackers in his party. In both cases, arrogance won out.
French voters are now vengeful and ready to vent their anger at Macron in the same way that British voters vented their anger at Sunak on Thursday. Both leaders are seen as elitist defenders of the wealthy. The Guardian wrote that both countries are “surging with a wave of discontent with governments led by men in their 40s who are overwhelmingly seen as toxic and naive.”
The crucial difference is that while angry British voters on Thursday rejected populist misrule, angry French voters this Sunday may embrace it. If they shove the Rally National into power, France will have demonstrated its indifference to an ill-advised British experiment driven in part by similar resentment against immigrants and similar fantasies of reviving a glorious past.
Like the Brexiteers in the UK’s Conservative Party, the Rally is committed to freeing France from EU rules and what they see as an affront to EU sovereignty. But Rally National leader Marine Le Pen, who once hailed Brexit as a “triumph of freedom” and freeing Britain from “servitude,” no longer says France will follow suit with “Frexit,” much less leave the eurozone’s common currency. She has learned that lesson from the Brexit debacle.
Instead, Ms. Le Pen and her protégé, Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old who is the likely prime minister if her party wins on Sunday, have promised a France First policy to subvert the EU from within. Their plan would undermine institutions essential to the peace and prosperity that have prevailed on the continent since World War II, until Vladimir Putin, whom Ms. Le Pen openly praised before his all-out invasion of Ukraine, plunged the EU into bloodshed again.
There is no reason to expect that France will come out of this experiment in isolationism in a happier position than Britain, but she, like Britain, may decide to learn its lessons the hard way.
