Both loved and loathed at home, Margaret Thatcher stirred similarly polarised feelings abroad. They began across the Channel. In office she had a tricky time with French leaders, whatever their political stripe. François Mitterrand once said that she had the mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula. Jacques Chirac, a former president on the right, was caught at a European summit declaring: “What more does that housewife want from me? My balls on a plate?”
Opinions divided
How the Iron Lady has been remembered abroad
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21576082-how-iron-lady-has-been-remembered-abroad-opinions-divided
BOTH loved and loathed at home, Margaret Thatcher stirred similarly polarised feelings abroad. They began across the Channel. In office she had a tricky time with French leaders, whatever their political stripe. François Mitterrand once said that she had the mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula. Jacques Chirac, a former president on the right, was caught at a European summit declaring: “What more does that housewife want from me? My balls on a plate?”
Such ambivalence underpinned the French reaction to her death. François Hollande, the Socialist president, went for measured praise, saying she had a “frank and loyal” relationship with France. He singled out only one achievement: the decision to build the Channel tunnel. Mr Chirac issued a statement recognising “past disagreements” as well as “mutual respect”, and praised her “tenacity”. Le Figaro, a right-wing newspaper, lamented the absence in France of a leader like her; but the left erupted with an outpouring of bile. Libération in its front-page headline called her “The grim reaper”. As for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, from the would-be revolutionary left, he tweeted that she would “discover in hell what she did to the miners” and called her simply “repulsive”.
America, by contrast, showed rare bipartisanship. Politicians of right and left praised her for her record at home and abroad but also—unusually—hailed her as a spine-stiffening friend who had, at vital moments, nudged America to be true to itself. Foreign leaders are rarely accorded such memorials.
In Republican memory Mrs Thatcher cannot be divided from Ronald Reagan, the conservative movement’s secular saint. Her death prompted pride in the two friends’ parallel achievements, as political leaders who pulled their countries back from a sense of inevitable decline, and their joint triumphs, most notably in speaking useful truths about the cruelty and weakness of the communist system. But today’s Republican leaders, battered by election setbacks, also liked her prickly obduracy, and her disdain for the vagaries of opinion polls or headlines. John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, drew particular comfort from her remark, “Defeat? I do not recognise the meaning of the word.”
Democrats similarly dug into Mrs Thatcher’s record as a guide for their own party. They assumed that Reagan had won votes for his right-wing policies in the 1980s simply because of his avuncular charm; but Mrs Thatcher was also winning elections on a platform of free markets, a roll-back of union power and individual liberty, and she was both strident and deeply unpopular. What Mrs Thatcher exposed, said Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council that laid the groundwork for Bill Clinton’s dragging of his party towards the centre ground, was that “we were selling products nobody really wanted to buy. They made us come up with our new ideas.”
Those hoping that Hillary Clinton might make a run for the presidency in 2016—including, it seems, Barack Obama—talked wistfully about Mrs Thatcher’s breaking of glass ceilings. The point was made by women elsewhere. In Norway Siv Jensen, the steely blonde leader of the free-market Progress Party, lavished praise on Mrs Thatcher as her inspiration. And in South Korea Park Geun-hye, the country’s first female leader, who has been compared to Mrs Thatcher for years and has only encouraged the comparison, expressed “great sorrow” at her death.
Mrs Park now faces her own Falklands moment with the growlings from Pyongyang; but it is Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan, who has been more recently inspired by Thatcher the warrior, in his confrontation with China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. He admitted being moved to tears by the scene in the film “The Iron Lady” where Mrs Thatcher, played by Meryl Streep, speaks about the war in the House of Commons.
No such sentimentality coloured the reaction in China, though Mrs Thatcher is a hero to the ultra-liberals and is even viewed with some respect by mainstream academics linked to the government. Much of the press coverage focused on her contribution to the 1984 agreement that led to Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997. But Chinese newspapers noted her submission to China’s unbending will in 1982, when, emboldened by the Falklands victory, she tried to push China for a deal that would allow for a continued British role in Hong Kong after 1997. Deng Xiaoping firmly made it clear that this was unacceptable. She rapidly capitulated. The Beijing Times, a Chinese-language newspaper, in an online review of her career, included pictures of her fall down the steps of the Great Hall of the People after her rebuff by Chinese leaders. Global Times, an English-language newspaper with a nationalist bent, noted that since Mrs Thatcher left office there had been no more iron men or iron ladies—partly because of a “decline in European power”, which made it impossible to maintain so rigid a stance.
War and peace
A rueful respect, with cautious use of words, characterised the reaction in the many countries and institutions that had had run-ins with Mrs Thatcher. In Brussels José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, said she would be remembered for both her contributions to, and her reservations about, the European project. Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament, noted that she had been a committed European “in the beginning”—without saying what she later became. In South Africa the ruling African National Congress (dismissed by Mrs Thatcher as a terrorist organisation), said it had been “on the receiving end of her policy”, and lamented her “failure to isolate apartheid” by agreeing to sanctions.
In Russia, though Vladimir Putin, the president, paid tribute to her historic role, the obituaries were short and did not make the front pages. It was telling that Mikhail Gorbachev (a man whom Mrs Thatcher famously said she could do business with) wrote about her for Britain’s Guardian, rather than any Russian newspaper. Though Mrs Thatcher wowed the Russian intelligentsia on her visit to Moscow in 1987, she had no connection with, and stirs little interest in, Mr Putin’s Russia.
The fiercest comments of all came, unsurprisingly, from Argentina, the old enemy. There the Argentine Veterans’ Association condemned her as a warmonger, and a legislator for the opposition Peronist faction called her a “symbol of aggression, destruction and death”. The picture was barely softened by General Guillermo Garín, once a spokesman for Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s military dictator in the 1980s. Pinochet, he noted, was “very fond of her”.