It was a gamble and she lost. European journalists - like UK ones - reached for the simplest metaphors in the early hours of Friday morning for Theresa May's June gambit. But there was an edge to their coverage: Britain's decision to leave the EU left the prime minister with few friends on the continent. "Brexit will be even more chaotic," declared Il Sole 24 Ore in Milan before referring to "uncertainty, the word the markets fear the most".
A commentator for Roma's left-leaning La Repubblica said Britain had been "unrelentingly spiralling" since Brexit and that the latest general election weakened the country in the face of negotiations with the EU. Corriere della Sera was blunter: Mrs May had been undone. She was no Margaret Thatcher.
Paris's Le Monde spared no contempt for Mrs May. She had suffered a "Cruel Spring", the paper said in its morning editorial. The result of the vote was "confused and hesitant", it said, just like Britain's position in relation to the EU. "In democracies the free expression of the people's will is respected," the paper added. "But sometimes it is indecipherable."
Spain's El Pais was also scathing about the prime minister. In its editorial entitled "the defeat of Theresa May", the respected daily said her "insufficient victory leaves a worrying question mark". The paper said: "If May brought forward the elections, as she insisted repeatedly, to secure a clear electoral backing in the face of the UK's crucial Brexit negotiations, then the results she obtained were the diametric opposite. If she did so, as everything appears to suggest, in order to solve solve the Conservative Party's problems of authority and legitimacy, then we can talk, without mincing our words, about a complete failure."
El Pais celebrated the disappearance of "populist" UKIP. "The electorate appears to have at last shaken off ultra-nationalist demagoguery It's a pity it could not have done so before the Brexit referendum."
The same paper's columnist ripped in to Mrs May. The basic premise of the script she wrote herself was incoherent, he said: "A strong and stable leader does not succumb to avarice."
In Germany, Frankfurter Allgemeine said Mrs May had "disaster", rival Suddeutsche Zeitung asked her if her "time was up" as prime minister and Spiegel called her the Egg Lady, not the iron one. Outside Europe, the coverage was still about Britain's relationship with the rest of the continent. The New York Times referred to "an upheaval just as Brexit talks begin". The Washington Post said: "The astonishing turn also threw into disarray the country’s plans for leaving the European Union, threatening to render Britain rudderless just days before talks were to begin with European leaders over the terms of the nation’s exit." In Russia, 24 news channel Vesti described Mrs May as stepping on her predecessor's rake: the tool, lying flat, had shot up and hit her in the face.
In Europe, there had been real Schadenfreude over the fate of Mrs May, who came to embody Brexit. Nicola Sturgeon, meanwhile, had been the darling of the continent's press. That did not stop the bad headlines after the SNP lost a third of its seats, especially in Spain where Catalonia has just announced its firs independence referendum against the will of the arch-unionist government in Madrid.
Right-wing title ABC said Ms Sturgeon had suffered a "heavy collapse" while most papers, giving far less prominence to the SNP than in previous years, referred to "blows". Especially in Spain there was talk of a a second independence referendum looking less likely.
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