Jacinda Ardern and Brexit

I started a new thread because the old Jacinda and Brexit threads are locked.

The New York Times - Jacinda Ardern Won’t Save You (abridged)

Opinion by Stephen Buranyi [a writer based in London.]

May 20, 2019

LONDON - The word most closely associated with Brexit at this point must surely be “disaster.”

 

But I’d bet on “fantasy” coming a close second.

 

Fantasy played a central role in the Leave campaign, of course, and as the years since the 2016 referendum have dragged on, the country has become ever more tolerant of it from all sides. ...

 

But the latest fantasy, emerging in the press and on social media as the politics around Brexit remain as deadlocked as ever and Prime Minister Theresa May founders before a Parliament that will neither pass her deal nor remove her from power, is to call for a competent foreign leader to take over the country.

 

Less “take back control” and more “why can’t someone else do it.”

 

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand is a popular candidate for the job.

 

Tony Blair’s former chief of staff wrote in The Guardian : “If the United Kingdom had been led by Ardern we might still have had Brexit, but we would not have ended up with this national humiliation, a divided society and an imperiled economy.”

 

This was echoed by a columnist in The Mirror : “If only Theresa were more like Jacinda maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess,” before declaring, “If only we could get her.”

Even a columnist in the Scottish Sun, a conservative paper, asked : “Can we adopt her? Please? Can we have her as Prime Minister, this living, smiling antidote to our own drippy, croaky, indecisive, soulless Theresa?”

 

The desire spills out on social media, too.

 

I hesitate to recommend Twitter as useful for any sort of public sentiment analysis, but right now there are people - real people with children, best-selling books and magazine columns - imploring not just Ms. Ardern, or the similarly affable prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, but Donald Tusk, a former prime minister of Poland and current president of the European Commission, to take over Britain.

 

The exact method of this potential coup is never discussed, because, of course, the people calling for it don’t actually mean it. But they do mean something.

 

This particular fantasy - a familiar foreign leader in competent managerial mode saving the country - is something entirely new, and not specific to Brexit. ...

 

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