International reaction to the appointment of Boris Johnson
as foreign secretary has been overwhelmingly negative. The news
prompted incredulity in stunned global capitals, with few finding
anything good to say about Britain’s new top diplomat. Some even
wondered whether the story was a joke.
This hostile view has several explanations. In his colourful career
as a newspaper columnist Johnson has offended a large number of world
leaders. They include the US president, Barack Obama, and his likely
successor, Hillary Clinton, as well as the Turkish president, Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan.
But additionally, and perhaps more seriously, Johnson is widely
viewed as inherently untrustworthy. In Brussels, and in other EU
capitals, he is seen as the man whose lies, opportunism and vaunting ego
brought about Britain’s disastrous EU exit.
This anger is genuine. And unlikely to dissipate quickly. On Thursday
France’s foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, summed up what most of
unhappy continental Europe felt, declaring: “He [Johnson] lied a lot to
the British. Now, he is the one with his back against the wall.”
The problem, in Ayrault’s damning view, was that France
needed a UK partner who was “clear, credible and reliable” and “with
whom I can negotiate”. This was not Johnson, he made clear. Much of the
rest of the world agrees, with Johnson regarded as a new and unnecessary
problem.
United States
In the US, the official reaction was one of carefully restrained laughter.
When State Department spokesman Mark Toner heard the news, he
struggled to keep a straight face – a broad smile breaking out more than
once – before saying the US “looked forward” to working with Johnson.
In the run-up to Brexit, the former mayor of London had sharply criticised Obama. Johnson was accused of dogwhistle racism
when he said in an article for the Sun in April that the “part-Kenyan”
US president’s “ancestral dislike of the British empire” had led him to
remove a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office.
Obama said in reply to Johnson that he voluntarily had a bust of
Churchill outside his private office on the White House’s second floor
“so that I see it every day – including on weekends when I’m going into
that office to watch a basketball game”. Johnson likened Hillary Clinton
to “a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital”.
Germany
The chancellor, Angela Merkel, refrained from commenting on the new
head of the Foreign Office. “I believe it is our task to work closely
with governments in allied countries. The world has enough problems for
us to progress in our foreign policy cooperation with Great Britain as
we have always done,” she told reporters.
Ralf Stegner, deputy chairman of the Social Democratic party,
Merkel’s junior coalition partner, said: “May looks weaker after such a
choice of personnel.” Johnson had not come across as an exemplary
diplomat in the past, Stegner said. “Now he is negotiating Brexit. Enjoy
the trip!”
Simone Peter, co-leader of the Green party, likened Johnson’s
appointment to “trusting the cat to keep the cream”. Green party
parliamentary co-leader Anton Hofreiter said appointing Johnson was “a
very bad sign for the leaving process and raises doubts over the
competency of the new prime minister”.
The Brussels correspondent of German public broadcaster ZDF, Anne
Gellinek, said that Johnson was “properly, properly hated” and seen as
“the head of a campaign of lies” in the EU’s headquarters. ZDF’s Berlin
correspondent, Nicole Diekmann, tweeted: “So, Boris Johnson, foreign
minister. British humour.”
Nikolaus Blome, the deputy editor of Germany’s biggest tabloid Bild,
tweeted: “There’s justice after all. As foreign minister, Boris Johnson
now has to lie in the bed he made himself.”
— Nikolaus Blome (@NikolausBlome) July 13, 2016Es gibt doch noch Gerechtigkeit: Als Außenminister muss Boris #Johnson die Suppe (mit) auslöffeln, die er seinem Land eingebrockt hat...
Jürgen Hardt, the foreign policy spokesman for Merkel’s Christian
Democrats, argued that putting leave campaigners in positions of power
may keep the UK in the EU.
“It is in every respect a smart move by the new prime minister
Theresa May to prominently involve the leading exponent of the leave
camp within her party in her government,” he wrote. “If this government,
with Johnson’s support, one day come to conclude in the face of the
facts that it should not complete an exit from the EU after all, it
would thus have guaranteed support in her party and possibly even
amongst the people.”
France
As well as the assessment of Johnson’s French counterpart that the
new UK foreign secretary was a “liar”, there was also a degree of
appalled surprise from French media and commentators, many of whom had
been shocked by what they saw as the intellectual dishonesty of some of
Johnson’s comments during the referendum campaign, namely when he
compared the EU to Adolf Hitler.
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