Good morning, and happy Friday. It’s the last full week of the General Election (thank goodness), so next Friday’s post will cover Germany’s reaction to the results…
Until then, I’ve got a range of articles from across the German press which each offer some quite interesting insights.
Süddeutsche Zeitung
The left-liberal SZ’s Michael Neudecker has filed one long-form article on the election this week (having also covered the release of Julian Assange from Belmarsh). Under the headline “Prime Minister Sunak faces a heavy defeat”, Neudecker’s opening lines read:
“Prime Minister Sunak faces a heavy defeat. They are struggling with the Labour Party, but above all with their own scandals. Even sheep flee when the Conservative leadership approaches: shortly before the election in the UK, things are not looking good for the Tories, who have been in power for 14 years.” Neudecker goes on to discuss the betting scandal, and the fact that many Conservatives are now either trying to distance themselves from their party, or even (as in the case of ERG Deputy Chair Andrea Jenkyns) associating themselves with Nigel Farage.
There’s an excellent account of a dinner with Charles Walker, Conservative MP for Broxbourne in Hertforshire:
A small group dinner with Charles Walker the other day: he has been a Conservative MP for 19 years, but is not standing for re-election, like 75 other Tory colleagues. Charles Walker is not a so-called One Nation Tory, i.e. not one of the moderate centre Tories who have joined together to form the same group. "I'm an old-fashioned Toff," he says, Sir Charles Walker, "Toffs" is the name given to the conservative upper-class aristocrats. Walker, 56, is a classic centre-right conservative, someone who doesn't like to be subordinate to any group. If you ask him whether the Tories should move further to the right in opposition, he says: "Oh God, no, of course not."
The article features a map of the projected outcome using data from the Financial Times’ prediction model.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)
The liberal-conservative FAZ’s Johannes Leithäuser, frankly, gives his attention to the those who stand to gain from this election. He ignores the Tories, and offers his readers a review of the Labour leader Keir Starmer, potentially on the cusp of entering Number 10, with some space given to the Reform and Lib Dem leaders.
His major focus is on Starmer’s attempts to control his party. His verdict is quite unsparing:
Unlike Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who has struggled to keep his Conservatives divided into two camps under control, Starmer has succeeded in transforming Labour from a left-wing populist-dominated force with anti-Semitic overtones into an efficiently organised centre-left party.
However, he has sometimes used methods that could have come from the toolbox of earlier orthodox socialist movements. This was most recently demonstrated by the example of Diane Abbott, a left-wing party icon who was expelled from the parliamentary group more than a year ago because of a newspaper article with a seemingly anti-Semitic turn of phrase.
Die Zeit
Penny Mordaunt’s team, already rumoured to be one of the frontrunners for the post-election Tory leadership, will be delighted with the coverage she gets in Die Zeit this week. She is described by the high-brow weekly’s London correspondent Bettina Schulz, who joined Mordaunt in her Portsmouth constituency, as “the British Conservatives’ hope for the future”, but paints her as a tragic figure who may be the leader the Tories never get if the polls in Paulsgrove are to be believed.
Schulz includes the staggering prediction that 21 of the 27 members of the Cabinet are at risk of losing their seats. Mordaunt is counted among them. Bettina reports how:
Asked about her role as an MP, she sighs: "It’s over."
Also mentioned is the spectre haunting the Conservatives: Nigel Farage. Schulz cites a Conservative Home survey which showed that 56% of Conservative members would welcome a pact with Farage and extending him the Tory whip.
Schulz suggests that Kemi Badenoch and Priti Patel are Mordaunt’s toughest opponents for the post-rout leadership, saying that they both have a better chance of taking the helm than her. Though she claims that Mordaunt is in a better position than James Cleverley or Tom Tugendhat, who “are also considered candidates”. But ultimately it seems Schulz’s verdict is she won’t be in the running at all after next Thursday.