We don’t notice it much, but these Germans love to make fun of us.
“The UK’s changed its prime minister lately almost as often as some people change their underpants,” crows the Bild, the right wing tabloid newspaper, listing the names of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak in case readers wondered who they were on about.
Throughout his premiership, Sunak has sparked incredulity in the minds of Germans. He’s from an immigrant background – so how and why is he so tough on asylum seekers, with a policy to pack them off to Rwanda of all places? It makes no sense! And now the German government is also flirting with this idea… look at Jens Spahn, the senior Christian Democrat, nipping off to Kigali to do a deal.
Elsewhere in the media landscape, there was genuine delight that David Lammy, the new foreign secretary, chose to make his first official foreign visit to Berlin, even though he told his German counterpart, Annalena Baerbock, that Britain would not seek to re-enter the European Union.
The thing that’s really caught the attention over here is Nigel Farage’s election to Westminster. The left liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung warned: “Shark alert on the Thames”, describing Farage’s party as the British version of the AfD, Germany’s far right populist party. Bild had an even less flattering epithet, calling him a “Brexsack”, a pun on Drecksack, German for shitbag.
Having raised this warning, the Süddeutsche has reassured its readers that under the British first-past-the-post electoral system, smaller parties are doomed to irrelevance, especially when confronted by a majority as large as Labour’s.
Most media outlets hope that Starmer will change the UK for the better. Babette Michel, a broadcaster with WDR in Cologne, told me: “If he can rescue the public health system and create a more humane politics around immigration, that will be wonderful. Wunderbar!”
The most enthusiastic welcome I encountered came from a middle-aged native of Erfurt, sporting a San Francisco T-shirt. He hoped and believed that Britain’s new prime minister – whose name escaped him – would save the UK from the social polarisation he and his family experienced on their recent road trip across the USA.
This is a fear you hear quite often here in Germany, particularly in relation to the regional elections, which will be held here in September. All parties except the AfD are planning coalitions, ganging up to keep the right wing populists out of power, as just happened in France. They call it “The Firewall”.
Only five years ago, the politician Walter Lübke was murdered on the veranda of his home by a right wing extremist after criticising Pegida, the far right anti-immigration movement. The spectre of extremism is often evoked on demonstrations. I recall one placard that read: “Fascism – never again? Never again is now!”
So a ray of hope from Westminster is especially welcome. Although Starmer and Lammy have explicitly stated that the UK is not planning to return to the EU, commentators here have seized on an interview that the new trade minister, Jonathan Reynolds, gave to Sky News.
The line that made it into the German media was his remark: “If we can sell more whisky and salmon in such an important market for us (as the EU) then we should make the most of these possibilities.”
Germany’s chattering classes liked the sound of that. It’s pragmatic and positive, and also proves that the way to a nation’s heart is through its stomach.
The only bum note in the chorus of approval was struck by Gareth Southgate and his team. England got through to the semi-finals of the Euros, hosted here in Germany. The German side did not.
Beaten by Spain, the controversial match provoked an outbreak of direct democracy: a petition with over 150,000 signatures to have the match replayed because the referee failed to penalise an apparent handball incident. And that referee, I’m afraid to say, was English.
This prompted not only indignation for football fans but a more generalised sense of humiliation that Germany’s footballers were being sent home early from their own tournament. So alongside the feelgood factor flowing from those new beginnings hailed by foreign ministers Baerbock and Lammy was a cold undercurrent of spite and a desire to see England beaten at the next opportunity.
The German language already has a word for this, of course: Schadenfreude.
Jane Whyatt is a freelance journalist based in Leipzig
