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Theresa May’s Brexit endgame is painful — but she’s not the only EU leader suffering

Tough at the top: Theresa May and Angela Merkel are both under pressure: EPA
Tough at the top: Theresa May and Angela Merkel are both under pressure: EPA

Theresa May’s endgame is so painful to watch because it combines the grave consequences of failed Brexit negotiations with the improbable comedy of operetta. Our phones pinged on Sunday with the hot news that Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab had raced off to meet Michel Barnier, his EU opposite number. Shortly after, we were informed that “key issues remain” and Raab had a day-return ticket home.

Since then an exhausted Prime Minister has trundled to the Commons (again) to announce with emphasis that she will not sign up to an interpretation of the “backstop” on the Irish border that she had effectively already agreed to in her bid to sell the Chequers plan in the summer. The clue to the mood around her was in the facial expressions on her benches. Or, as one described the experience, “We all went to our unhappy place.”

Mood changes are as important in endgames as events. And the underlying shift is that it is no longer only plotters and rebels preparing for May to go — it is practically everyone on her team. I have not encountered a member of the Cabinet since the return to Parliament who speaks of the PM with more than teeth-gritted tolerance.

Steve Baker, the prolific (pro-Leave) backbench MP, argued on Newsnight that there are “not the numbers on the spreadsheet” of Brexiteers to bring down the PM. More likely, though, pragmatists in her Cabinet and senior ministerial ranks will choose the timing of her departure either by letters flooding into the 1922 committee or by sparing a divisive leadership battle and mounting a “moderates’ coup” asking her to go. In this scenario, the main “Brexit centrists” (Sajid Javid and Jeremy Hunt ) will agree with the more realistic end of the Leave spectrum (Michael Gove and Raab) to force her to ditch the Chequers plan.

Such a transition is fraught with risks. When the single biggest issue of the day has not been resolved by the Prime Minister, the case for keeping her gets harder. A symptom of endgame mentality is that risk analysis tends to become less important than the desire to do something to end the misery.

Anne McElvoy
Anne McElvoy

The uncertainty besetting the British Government is not an isolated case. Indeed, when May addresses the EU 27 at a dinner launching the European Council summit tomorrow, she will find herself in the company of leaders contemplating failures and fissures of their own.

Angela Merkel, diminished by a poor election result last year, heads a coalition that has seen its Right-wing flank — the once-mighty Christian Social Union — and her centre-Left coalition prop, the Social Democrats, flop in the Bavarian state election on Sunday. A test in Hessen in two weeks looks dicey for Merkel too, many Germans are Merkelmüde (tired of Merkel).

Against this backdrop Brexit has tested the limits of Germany foreign policy imagination — and that is a shame. For all the self-inflicted wounds of the referendum, a Europe with Britain and Germany aligned is stronger than one in which the relationship is distanced and fractious. But a slew of other events, from the migration crisis to the strain on Merkel’s chancellorship, has led to two tired leaderships failing to achieve much to offset the damage of Britain’s EU rupture.

"The Eurozone is under siege from an unstable populist coalition in Italy putting the EU and Germany on the spot"

The testy mood on the continent also has roots far beyond Britain’s Brexit dithering. The Eurozone is under siege from an unstable populist coalition in Italy testing its budget constraints and putting the EU and Germany (as the disciplinarian of the currency union) on the spot about how to respond without feeding more extreme politics in the run-up to the European parliament elections next year.

True enough: sceptics have been predicting the demise of the euro since William Hague compared it to “a burning building with no exits”. But even if that’s not the case, Italy, in the bombastic mood of a country with a newly elected populist coalition, has the potential to cause the EU a serious headache.

A senior German finance figure notes that Britain will cause an “unpleasant but containable” problem if it leaves the EU on terms unaligned to the single market. Italy, on the other hand, poses a “threat to the whole model” if it insists on remaining in the Eurozone but rejects its spending constraints.

An Italian crisis sparked by a government preaching easy solutions to stagnation and blaming the EU for low-growth policies is a recipe for disruption. Add to the fissile mix the French presidency under Emmanuel Macron. It has hit early doldrums, partly as a result of entrenched interests against his reform plans but also after a summer of gaffes. Now a pot-boiling biography of the Macrons’ powerful PR confidante cites rumours that even Brigitte Macron deems her other half “too aloof, too snappy”.

In the grand scheme of things it’s not exactly a government death knell. But the Merkel-Macron pact — a kind of backstop for liberal centrism — is not in the best shape either. Their relationship has become more distant because Merkel, preoccupied with maintaining her coalition at home, has given little active support to the French leader’s grand project to overhaul the Eurozone and help to subsidise French reforms.

The grand irony of all of this is that as an irritated EU runs out of patience with the UK’s demands for the ideal “staying-while-going” Brexit arrangement, its internal condition is perilously fractious. That mood of unhappy apprehension is at least familiar to May from an increasingly unsteady perch in Downing Street. It’s also the reason so many on her own side are weighing their options and counting the days.

  • Anne McElvoy is senior editor at The Economist