‘Borexit’: How the foreign press covered Boris’s resignation

Boris Johnson’s departure isn’t just front-page news in the UK. Germany’s press – which has never been much of a fan of Johnson since the days of Brexit – has taken a sombre, if derisive, tone towards his resignation. Today has seen the coining of a new term in the media, with popular tabloid Bild.de splashing the one-word headline ‘Borexit’ across the top of their homepage in a large green mockup of a fire exit sign.

German broadsheet Der Tagesspiegel takes its readers through a chronology of the scandals that consumed Johnson’s time in office, eye-catchingly branding him a ‘scandal noodle’. The paper reminds readers that Johnson is the first British leader to have ever broken the law while in office, and makes much of his controversial prorogation of parliament, as well as wallpapergate and partygate.

The French press also don’t seem sorry to see Johnson go. Broadsheet Le Figaro has devoted a rolling live feed to the news, with blow-by-blow updates as he gave his resignation speech. The feed also includes a poll on the question ‘Was Boris Johnson a good Prime Minister?’ – of the 67,317 readers who answered at the time of writing, 74.8 per cent responded ‘no’.

In a headline that would probably make the PM smile, Spanish newspaper El Pais heralds the end of the ‘Brexit wizard’. Nevertheless, pulling no punches, the paper takes its readers through Johnson’s many highs and lows. Starting from his time as Mayor of London, it describes his election as PM as an ‘earthquake’ and his downfall as being due to ‘cracks that became black holes’. Ultimately, their obituary serves a damning verdict on Johnson, branding him a Prime Minister who ‘hates giving bad news’ and ‘craves the approval of others above all else’.

The Danish press takes a pretty damning view of Johnson’s premiership. Blasting his attempts to cling on to power this week as ‘embarrassing’, tabloid Ekstra Bladet declares that MPs were ‘disgusted’ by him in his final days. The paper says that while Johnson successfully delivered the Conservatives’ largest majority for several decades, party members knew they had ‘made a deal with the devil’.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Russian press is quite jovial about Boris’s exit. The broadsheet Izvestiya headlines their analysis of Johnson’s time in office as ‘The party’s over’. Branding him ‘eccentric’, the paper runs through the PM’s many gaffes, including a certain limerick concerning Turkish leader Recep Erdogan and a goat. Elsewhere, the paper reports on Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov’s declaration that ‘Johnson doesn’t like us very much and we don’t like him either’.

Only the Ukrainian papers have expressed any regret at Johnson’s departure. The broadsheet Expres leads their coverage with the hope that he ‘can be replaced by a politician who also supports Ukraine’. As my colleague Svitlana Moronets writes, Ukrainians are in mourning for Johnson, who has become a hero there over his hawkish attitude towards Putin's war.