LONDON – From the so-called “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain, political cycles have blossomed that have influenced the whole West and a large part of the world: Thatcher-Reagan, neoliberalism; Clinton-Blair, the reformist “third way” of the left; Johnson-Trump, populism. Now the election of Joe Biden at the White House could trigger a new season across the Atlantic. Or at least bring to sunset after Donald Trump, even the populist leader who seems to be his European double: Boris Johnson.
“There is nothing more pathetic than a former president,” he said John Quincy Adams, sixth American president. Nothing more pathetic, except perhaps “the imitation of a former president”, as theObserver, alluding to a conservative prime minister who some have dubbed “the mini-Trump”. Continuing to pose as British Trump, after Trump has left the scene, the London Sunday paper argues, would be counterproductive: no one wants to have a loser as a model. What’s worse for him, Johnson loses the partner who urged him to push the Brexit accelerator to the limit, break free from the shackles of the European Union and embrace a casual business relationship with the US.
For the UK, Brexit was already a problem. The economic crisis triggered by the Covid pandemic has made it even more serious. But if you add the Biden presidency to this, the cocktail can become explosive. During the presidential campaign, the Democratic candidate clearly warned: if Brexit threatens peace in Ireland, the country where Biden’s family originated (and from which millions of immigrants have come to America), there will be no chance of a free trade pact with Great Britain.
The most serious threat to Irish peace, reached in 1998 with the mediation of Washington, would be the “no deal”, the exit of Great Britain from the EU without any agreement: a hypothesis still possible, a few weeks after the obligatory end of the negotiations between the two parties, which must be concluded in any way by the deadline already set for 31 December.
So in London it was said that Johnson would wait for the result of the US presidential elections to decide whether to approve the concessions necessary for an agreement with Brussels. For the same reason, it is now said that Downing Street will be forced to authorize a compromise at any cost in order to reach an agreement with the EU. “Brexit with the no deal e Biden at the White House they would make the UK feel very isolated in the world ”, warns the Financial Times. The doubt is whether even a Brexit with an agreement will be enough to strengthen the “special relationship” between two countries “divided by the same language”, as an old joke calls them, and now also by two radically different leaderships.
Boris Johnson was quick to congratulate Biden. But in the past, the Democratic candidate has made no secret of his antipathy towards the British premier, considering him “a clone of Trump”. And as it indicates Tommy Vietor, former spokesperson for Barack Obama, the new US administration “will not forget Johnson’s racist comments about Obama and his servile devotion to Trump.” In trouble on all fronts, from the pandemic to Brexit, the conservative leader should abandon the image of unscrupulous populist to recreate one in relations with the new tenant of the White House. The coronavirus had already made him stop wanting to joke. Now, facing Biden, the first of Europe’s populists is naked, so to speak.
It is early to say whether Joe Biden will find in London, possibly in the Labor leader Keir Starmer (at the head of five points in the polls), a partner capable of opening another cycle in the West: the recipe for beating populism, the return to seriousness and solidarity in politics. But as someone on social media already jokes, “after a populist blond, another could fall”. Of course, Boris Johnson’s position has suddenly become more precarious and complicated. Across the Atlantic is no longer the time for jokes.
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