Britain and France: A tale of two follies?
Brits punish the Tories, who brought them Brexit and stagnation. Will France be deaf to the lesson?
PARIS — As it slouches toward a second Trump administration, the United States is demonstrating a great country’s capacity for self-destruction. France, another great nation, is teetering on a similar precipice ahead of elections Sunday that could hand control of the government to a party with pro-Nazi historical roots and a contemporary agenda that remains nationalist and racist.
Yet it is Britain that set the modern template for self-immolation of an illustrious old democracy when it, by embracing Brexit eight years ago, threw itself into an economic sinkhole from which it remains hard-pressed to emerge.
On Thursday, British voters overwhelmingly punished the Conservative Party, which birthed Brexit in 2016. In one of the country’s most lopsided general elections, the Labour Party won more than three times as many seats in Parliament as the Conservatives. After 14 years in opposition, Labour returned to power Friday and installed as prime minister its leader, Keir Starmer, whose candidacy made a virtue of disciplined under-promising.
The Conservatives richly deserve long-term exile for the disaster of Brexit, which, according to a new report by Cambridge Econometrics, a think tank, is expected to drain nearly $400 billion from the British economy by 2035 — a tidy sum in a country whose annual output is smaller than California’s.
The landslide in Britain wasn’t only about Brexit. After 14 years in power, the Conservatives left so many good reasons to vote against them that it’s fair to wonder whether the party, founded in 1834, will survive as a major political force. Under the Tories’ watch, the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street in London was occupied by a dyspeptic culture warrior (Theresa May), who was succeeded by a fustian blowhard (Boris Johnson), who begot an economic ignoramus (Liz Truss).
Truss, whose term lasted seven weeks, was succeeded by Rishi Sunak, whose flailing policies could not reverse the damage done by his predecessors. Amid historic wage stagnation, the average British worker today would be earning roughly $4,600 more annually if their pay had grown in line with American or German incomes since 2010, according to the Resolution Foundation, a think tank in London.
In a rational world, Britain’s malaise would have exerted a chastening effect on other nations, dissuading them from taking reckless risks as Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron did by instigating the Brexit referendum in the first place, confident it would not pass.
But the world is not rational, as President Emmanuel Macron demonstrated last month by calling snap elections for the French National Assembly after his centrist bloc suffered a crushing defeat in elections for the European Parliament at the hands of the populist, immigrant-bashing National Rally. Like Cameron’s rash gamble on the Brexit vote, intended to silence the Britain-firsters and E.U. bashers in his party’s nativist fringe, Macron’s folly was a staggering miscalculation. In both cases, hubris carried the day.
France’s voters are now in a vengeful mood, poised to unleash their anger on Macron, just as Britain’s did Thursday on Sunak. Each leader is seen as an elitist champion of the rich. Both countries, wrote the Guardian, are awash in “a tidal wave of discontent against governments led by smartly dressed forty-something men overwhelmingly perceived as toxic and out of touch.”
The crucial difference is that angry British voters on Thursday repudiated populist misgovernance, while this Sunday angry French ones might well embrace it. If they do, by elevating the National Rally to power, it will suggest France has been heedless of Britain’s ill-advised experiment, prompted partly by similar resentments over immigration and similar pipe dreams of reviving a resplendent past.
Like Britain’s Conservative Brexiteers, National Rally promises to liberate France from E.U. rules and their supposed affront to sovereignty. But National Rally’s leader, Marine Le Pen, who once celebrated Brexit as a “victory for freedom” that liberated Britain from what she called “servitude,” no longer speaks of France following suit with a “Frexit,” let alone quitting the euro zone’s common currency. She has learned that much from the Brexit fiasco.
Instead, she and her protégé, Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old boy wonder who would be prime minister if the party is victorious Sunday, have promised a France-first agenda that would subvert the E.U. from within. Their program would undercut an institution critical to the peace and prosperity that have prevailed on the continent since World War II — until Vladimir Putin, whom Le Pen openly admired before his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, dragged it back into bloodshed.
There is no reason to expect the results of such an isolationist experiment would leave France in a happier place than Britain has found itself. But France, like Britain, might be determined to learn that lesson the hard way.