[ Editorial ] No Anarchy in the UK (Yet)

Perfidious Albion, unlike France, finds itself in nothing more than a temporary political impasse. Not that there's nothing to worry about.

You know the tune: peoples are not their leaders. The British, for all their periodic bouts of tabloid Francophobia, are rather fond of us — a feeling we return in kind.

Britain’s current leaders are inept, first and foremost toward their own country, yet bear us no particular ill will. Germany’s leaders, on the other hand — the hübsche — despise us, even as ordinary Germans, true to the old adage Wie Gott in Frankreich (to live as God lives in France, meaning in pure contentment), hold a genuine warmth for the French.

What strange masochism drives the French ruling class to persist, nearly sixty years on, in the fantasy of a Franco-German “couple” that has never existed? The obsessive neurosis of binding oneself to those who revile us from across the Rhine is nothing new. There was even a word for it once — Collaboration — and it stretches back as far as the First World War. L’Entente Cordiale has proven far more enduring.

Listening closely to Chancellor Merz — the latest face of that CDU/CSU-SPD coalition, Merkel's GroKo, which has been quietly poisoning Europe for the better part of twenty years — one might reasonably wonder whether the Russians deserve some help rebuilding the Wall, since Berlin seems to have forgotten the very treaty - the 2+4 - that made reunification possible.

As for the Constitution of the French Fifth Republic: in both its spirit and its letter, it draws its inspiration from British parliamentary democracy. Honni soit qui mal y pense.