One cannot overstate last weekend’s events, but as the UK is the birthplace of understatement, a blunt German take may help. Here it is: the post-Brexit era is over, thanks to Putin’s aggression, Trumpsky’s greed – and Keir Starmer’s diplomatic finesse.
Until a few days ago, most Germans wouldn’t have known the prime minister’s name, such has been the view of British politics in our media for some time. Suddenly, the UK is basking in more praise than in all the years since the London Olympics put together.
Watching the PM all over the telly had a strangely calming effect on everyone’s nerves and gave confidence to a downcast nation (I mean Germany, not Ukraine). With Berlin stuck in a post-electoral interregnum, here was someone actually willing and able to act – for Europe.
Left wing Die Tageszeitung commended Starmer’s “mediating role” and the “particularly warm reception” in London after the Ukrainian president’s humiliation in Washington. Hamburg’s Die Zeit noted dryly: “Now it’s the British holding Europe together” and went on to say: “Keir Starmer is taking the diplomatic initiative while many EU leaders are busy fuming over Trump. Their inertia must not stand in the way of a peace plan for Ukraine.”
Volksstimme from east German Magdeburg also contrasted the “paralysed” Europeans with Starmer. It said he was “filling the leadership vacuum” in Europe: “The British, of all people, as EU renegades, are becoming the driving force. The EU’s top team of almost 30 commissioners is looking foolish: the London government alone can do what the Brussels apparatus has not been able to do so far.”
In fewer words, Thorsten Benner of Berlin’s Global Public Policy Institute posted: “Good to be able to rely on the UK when and where it matters.”
Centre right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) was impressed by Starmer’s visit to the White House: “(He) seems to have arrived on the world stage – as a level-headed pragmatist.” The paper also reminded readers that the UK had backed Ukraine “earlier and more substantially than any other European country”.
Meanwhile, Wolfgang Ischinger, influential former ambassador to Washington and London, made a plea for strengthening Europe’s deterrence, prominently featuring the nuclear powers France and the UK: “This path is not currently feasible with all 27 member states. Therefore, this initiative should be launched in the spirit of a multi-speed Europe,” he wrote in FAZ. “(The) partners should develop a mechanism to ensure the closest possible involvement of the UK.”
Germany’s likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said he found it “extraordinarily encouraging” that “the British government is playing a very constructive role in the process of shaping European opinion and, frankly, the fact that the UK is no longer a member of the EU hardly matters.”
I’m sure Merz even envies Starmer: the British PM has a majority of his own to approve a new loan for Ukraine and fresh defence spending. Merz does not. Worse still: voters’ wisdom has handed the far right AfD and the far left Die Linke a blocking minority in the new Bundestag. A minority that could rule out Merz’s plan to fund special defence assets within Germany’s rigid fiscal rules.
As the new parliament hasn’t formed yet, however, Merz will probably come up with the workaround to have his extra debt scheme approved by a two-thirds majority provided by the current one – including CDU/CSU, the SPD and the Greens – which can still hold sessions and in which AfD and Die Linke are much smaller. It could be up to €900bn of Sondervermögen (separate assets) bypassing the Schuldenbremse (debt brake).
Roughly half would go to defence (both at home and in Ukraine), and the rest would prop up Germany’s crumbling infrastructure. This isn’t exactly democracy by the book, zealots may say, but it looks like the only way forward for the next government to end up in paralysis before it has even begun.
The most striking numbers of all, however, came from the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, en route to London: “This is a paradox, listen to how it sounds: 500 million Europeans ask 300 million Americans to protect them from 140 million Russians. If you know how to count, rely on yourself,” he said.
Note the “500 million Europeans”. Since 2016, we’ve been used to only hearing 450 million, excluding the British. So, again: if Brexit was the single most dividing moment in recent European history, the prime minister’s face-saving initiative may just be its most unifying.
