Minds

In the window of France’s best-known gay bookshop, above the display of Lucian Freud art books, opera singer Maria Callas’s memoirs and a history of the Pride movement, a poster warns in giant red letters: “Cultural heritage in danger.” An urgent note on the door adds: “We need your help!”

Les Mots à La Bouche, a 40-year-old Paris institution, is the top LGBT bookshop in France and considered one of the best in the world – a focal point of Paris’s historic gay neighbourhood in the Marais district. But as property speculation in central Paris reaches dizzying heights – it is estimated that at certain times of year there are more Airbnb rentals than residents in the Marais – the bookshop is being forced out by rising rents.

Its departure is a blow to Paris’s gay community as activists warn that central Paris is destroying its cultural identity by allowing luxury fashion shops aimed at rich tourists to force out local businesses, including gay bars.

As the local cabaret star, Yvette Leglaire, said: “The gay Marais is dying.” The Paris tourist board still promotes the Marais as “an authentic yet trendy little village” but its gay scene, which began in the 1980s when the area was still working class, shabby and cheap, is slowly being eroded. Several historic gay bars have closed in recent years as fashion labels from Lacoste to Chanel move in.

The Marais’ Jewish area, situated around Rue des Rosiers, is not immune, with commercial rents doubling between 2012 and 2018. There are fears that, as with Barcelona or Venice, property speculation and commercial pursuit of profit from tourism will strip central Paris of its originality and local appeal. One long-term resident says the onslaught of luxury fashion brands is turning the Marais into “a giant, open-air duty free shop”.

Sébastien Grisez, manager at Les Mots à La Bouche, says: “Paris city hall promotes the gay history of the Marais and it has painted the crossroads here in rainbow colours, but no longer having our bookshop here seems absurd.”

The shop, which has been in the Marais since 1983, is open seven days a week until 11pm and stocks more than 16,000 titles. But like many historic gay bars that closed under pressure from rising rents, the shop has been given until March to find a new location elsewhere in Paris . There are rumours that a Doc Marten shoe shop will take its place.

Grisez says: “Ten years ago, there were far more gay bars here, now only a few are left. It’s true that gay sociology is changing – people are more spread out, there is perhaps less need to meet in bars when you can meet on apps. But even so, people regret that this neighbourhood meeting point is disappearing.”

Alain Lesturgez, who works for the forestry federation, has been coming to the bookshop for 20 years. He says: “This move would be the end of an era. It’s a place where a bookseller would take time to advise you. Once, the Marais had a lot of life, but now the luxury shops make it look the same as many other places in the world.”

At the Open Bar, a historic gay venue set up by rights activist Sébastien Fossa, the manager, says: “The neighbourhood is increasingly losing its soul. It started out as a working-class neighbourhood. Gradually, the arrival of luxury brands has broken the dynamic here.”

Fayçal Khiatine, who runs nearby gay bar Cox, says: “When a bookshop leaves, it’s daily neighbourhood life that will lose out.”

Christian Ducou, who was born and raised in the working-class Marais of the 1950s and 60s, looks out of his kitchen window at a shiny new two-storey Calvin Klein store. He has lived there since kids played in the street and many flats had shared bathrooms on the landing and no toilets. “The first rich person I saw was the photographer Helmut Newton when he moved here,” he says.

His wife, Liliane, says: “Strangely, these luxury shops are often empty. It’s as if they only set up here to have a Marais address. This neighbourhood just doesn’t seem to work as a place for luxury fashion shops. There are tiny narrow streets with no place for a limousine to park, yet they’re putting in the same extremely expensive shops you’d expect to see on a boulevard with chauffeur-driven cars waiting outside.”

As the spring mayoral elections approach, politicians are fretting about how to save central Paris’s soul from property speculation and intense tourism – or whether it’s already too late. David Belliard, a Green candidate, says the fact that Les Mots à La Bouche is being forced out of the Marais shows the French capital is being deformed and “now only aimed at tourists”. The local socialist mayor of the 4^th arrondissement has promised to help the bookshop find a new location but, with a March deadline looming, one has yet to be found.

Sébastien Raymond, an actor, says: “This bookshop always felt like a cocoon. You knew you’d be accepted here. You felt safe.”

A surge in drug-linked gang violence in Sweden led to a 60% increase in bomb blasts in 2019, according to government statistics, as police work to rid the streets of explosives and guns with more officers on patrol.

Sweden has been hit by a wave of shootings and bombings over the past couple of years, which police have linked to gang conflicts in major cities, shocking Swedes, who have long considered their country as one of the safest in the world.

Some 257 bomb attacks were reported to police last year, up from 162 the previous year, the statistics from the National Council for Crime Prevention showed.

The agency did not give any information about the types of explosives most frequently used nor any other details, but Swedish media have reported some attackers used makeshift bombs made from vacuum flasks packed with explosive material.

The public outcry over increased violence has forced the government to boost spending on the police and to launch a programme to fight organised crime, as law and order becomes one of the main political battlefields.

Ulf Kristersson, leader of the opposition Moderates party, said: “This government has lost control over crime in Sweden. We have seen in recent years how the number of fatalities has increased. Now bomb blasts are also increasing in a way that lacks international equivalence.”

The office of the prime minister, Stefan Löfven, declined to comment on the figures, which were contained within a broader report on reported crime, which overall was down marginally in 2019 against the previous year.

The interior minister, Mikael Damberg, on Monday told the Swedish news agency TT he was convinced a new police taskforce would make a difference, and that he aimed for sentences for bomb attacks and smuggling to be stiffened by the end of the year.

Police have identified about 60 deprived areas, mainly in and around larger cities, where unemployment is high, incomes low, and where drugs and gangs have gained a firm foothold.

In November they set up a task force to fight violent crime following the death of a 15-year-old boy in Malmö, when a gunman open fire on a pizza restaurant.

At the time, the police said the taskforce would focus on getting criminals off the streets, reducing access to guns and explosives, and increasing the police presence in affected areas.

However, they said the problems were impossible to solve by the police alone.

“There is no simple solution to complex problems,” Stefan Hector, the head of the taskforce, said in November.

Kristersson made his comments after an explosion on Sunday in one of Stockholm’s most high-end neighbourhoods, which destroyed part of a residential building and several cars parked outside. The blast was heard several miles away, but no one was injured in the explosion.

By the time the brass band came out blaring Bella, Ciao, the wooden floor was heaving under the weight of hundreds of revellers. Last Friday night, the rowdiest party in Berlin was at a century-old ballroom in the gentrified Mitte neighbourhood. Unlike at the city’s techno clubs, the guests queuing for Clärchens Ballhaus ran the gamut from grade-schoolers to retirees.

“I’ve been coming here since 1983 and it looked pretty much the same then,” said Matthias Kühne. “There’s always been a mix of young and old, rich and poor on the dancefloor.”

In a city that has undergone seismic cultural shifts in recent decades, Clärchens Ballhaus has remained a rare and anachronistic constant. The Spiegelsaal, its grand mirrored ballroom, survived the Third Reich, the GDR and illegal sword duels. During the second world war, the Nazis closed the Ballhaus, Russian troops used it as a horse stable, and an allied bombing raid obliterated part of the building.

But after all it has endured, this raucous ball will be its last for some time. Last year, the landlord refused to renew the lease – a common tale that has shuttered or put numerous notable Berlin nightlife venues at risk, including the notorious KitKatClub. When news broke of Clärchens’ possible closure, the public outcry was immediate.

“We’re leaving this place at a high-point. The last year has been so crazy – it’s been packed every night,” said Lisa Regehr, a dancer who has run the ballroom along with her husband, David and his business partner Christian Schulz. When the couple arrived in 2004, many of the windows were boarded up and debris littered the floor of the Spiegelsaal. Bringing it back from the brink of dereliction wasn’t easy, but they maintain it was worth it.

“There may be people who are more financially successful than us but we never did this for the money. We’ve always viewed this place as a living work of art,” says David. “Under the GDR, everyone came here because this was one of the only places where you could dance.”

There will be dancing in Clärchens’ future, although no one is sure what that will look like. Last year, Yoram Roth, the Berliner who is the majority shareholder and chairman of the Fotografiska (a centre for contemporary photography), announced he would be stepping in to save it.

Roth says he is committed to preserving the institution’s historic character: “I’m deeply in love with the place. I want the building to look as though no one has touched it. You could restore it so that it looks flawlessly new, which I’d find soulless. To restore it so that it looks untouched will cost a lot more but it’s worth it because that’s what makes this place magical.”

While some worried that the new owner may want to build condominiums on the valuable real estate out front, which currently houses a beer garden, Roth says that is out of the question. “If you put apartments everywhere, by right the owners can demand a certain quietude after 10pm, which runs into conflict with club culture. People come to Berlin to consume culture, whether that’s history, nightclubs or the opera. We have to support and maintain our club culture and Clärchens is part of that.”

A petition attached to an open letter asking Roth to allow the Regehrs to continue overseeing operations has so far gathered 7,049 signatures. However, Roth says that he plans to work with a new, unnamed partner. Although he plans to host events and partially reopen Clärchens for the summer season, there is no fixed date for the venue fully reopening. More than 100 staff members will be let go with no guarantee of return.

While the final festivities were bittersweet, David and Lisa insisted on a party rather than a funeral. As the night wore on, the two could be seen hugging regulars and greeting them by name.

“These last two evenings are a celebration of this time and this place,” Lisa says. “So many guests have taken our hands and said, ‘Thank you so much for all the good times all these years.’”

Carmakers could pull models from the UK, the automotive industry has warned, as Britain’s taste for polluting vehicles clashes with the difficulty of meeting post-Brexit carbon dioxide limits.

Under new EU rules, average carbon dioxide emissions of almost all cars sold in 2020 and 2021 across the single market, including the UK, must fall below 95g a kilometre, with heavy fines for carmakers that miss individual targets designed to meet the goal.

The heavier, fuel-inefficient SUVs favoured by Britons have been offset by the smaller, less polluting cars preferred in countries such as Italy. But after Brexit, when the UK plans to copy EU rules, this will no longer be the case, making a UK-only limit harder to hit.

Mike Hawes, the chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), the car industry lobby group, said: “[Carmakers] will have to look at their model mix … you’ve got to see whether that’s economic. The fines are going to be severe and all of them will do everything they can to avoid that.

“It could be that you see a reduction in consumer choice through the removal of higher-emitting vehicles from not just the top end, but particular segments.”

While having to pull models from sale would be a blow to the car industry, the rules could prove to be environmentally effective if they reduce sales of the most polluting models. Cars account for just over 18% of UK emissions, according to government figures, and action in the transport sector is considered crucial to cutting emissions to 51% of 1990 levels by 2025 and to reach net zero by 2050.

Mel Evans, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said: “Carmakers are not obliged to aggressively market heavy, polluting cars. They know that we are in a climate emergency and yet keep accelerating towards the cliff edge, because bigger, dirtier cars have higher profit margins. And because they use more petrol and diesel, the oil companies cash in as well.

“To address the climate crisis, manufacturers need to U-turn on petrol and diesel, stop spending millions drumming up demand for their dirtiest cars, and focus on electric vehicles for a post-oil world.”

The carbon dioxide emissions of cars sold to British consumers rose for the third year in a row in 2019, underlining the scale of the challenge for the industry as it tries to meet the new EU limits.

However, the prospect of an imminent Brexit at the end of January will force carmakers to make choices before the end of 2020, when the implementation period is scheduled to end and the UK-only limits kick in. That could include choosing to sell electric cars in the EU rather than the UK if they judge Europe to be a more important market.

Carmakers are rushing to bring to market new electric cars with zero exhaust emissions – including Volkswagen’s ID.3, Vauxhall’s Corsa-e and an electric Fiat 500 – this year, but production will initially be limited as factories gear up. At the same time, they are keen to hang on to their profitable but polluting sales of internal combustion engines.

Carmakers breaching their individual CO₂ targets will pay fines of €95 (£83) for every gram they are over their limit, multiplied by the number of cars sold that year. Average UK emissions were 127.9g a kilometre in 2019, the SMMT said, 35% above the 95g target for 2020 and 2021. The UK is planning to adopt the EU fine structure after Brexit.

Al Bedwell, an analyst at the car consultancy LMC Automotive, said he expected some higher-polluting models to be withdrawn from sale across both the EU and the UK in the next two years. However, he said major efforts to increase sales of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) might not work in the absence of consumer demand.

“You can’t suddenly create a perfect environment to sell enough BEVs to make the problem go away,” he said.

The Department for Transport said: “Our priority is to protect everyone from unsafe vehicles, including those that are damaging our environment, which is why we continue to work with industry to improve the emissions standards of all vehicles.

“We have set out bold plans for driving down CO₂ emissions and committed in our ‘Road to Zero’ strategy to pursue vehicle emissions regulation that is at least as ambitious as the current arrangements as we leave the EU.”

High-wage Nordic countries, including Denmark and Sweden, are battling plans to introduce an EU-wide minimum wage over fears the measure will undermine their century-old models of collective bargaining.

The European commission will take the first step towards a common framework for setting minimum wages in EU member states on Tuesday as part of a pledge by its new president, Ursula von der Leyen to stem a “brain drain” from east to west.

But with the backing of major unions, politicians in countries where employer-worker negotiations set the rates of pay are set to challenge the proposals.

They argue that Brussels’ intervention could ultimately lead to lower wages among their workforces.

Denmark’s employment minister, Peter Hummelgaard, told the Guardian that he backed higher wages for those least well paid in Europe but that “the means to achieve this goal must respect national traditions and well-functioning models”.

He said: “In Denmark, wages are negotiated by the trade unions and the employers’ organisations alone – it has been that way for more than 100 years.”

Of the 28 member states, only Denmark, Italy, Cyprus, Austria, Finland and Sweden do not have a statutory minimum wage.

But workers in Nordic countries enjoy comparatively high average salaries with employers in Denmark paying labour costs of €43.50 (£37) an hour per worker in 2018 – the highest in the EU.

Danes on even the lowest salaries can expect to be paid around £15 an hour. Swedish and Finnish workers are similarly well paid under their collective bargaining models.

Employees who are not union members are often covered by the collective agreements in the Nordic states. It is feared that a statutory minimum wage could lead to employers challenging such arrangements on the grounds that a reasonable pay threshold is on the statute books and it does not need be improved upon.

The commission will launch its consultation this week, but the Danish government is seeking written guarantees that its collective bargaining system will be exempt from any new directive. Finnish and Swedish ministers have voiced similar concerns.

Hummelgaard said he had received assurances from Nicolas Schmit, the new European commissioner for jobs and social rights, but that he feared risks remained.

“We will read the forthcoming proposal carefully, as the devil is in the detail and I am still worried that our model could be undermined,” he said. “There is no doubt that the Danish government is doing everything in its power to ensure that models like the Nordic ones are not challenged by EU regulation, which is also why I discuss the matter with my European colleagues whenever I have the chance.”

Henri Lindholm, a Finnish union leader who is also a leading member of Nordiska Unionen, a pan-Nordic union representing workers in the food industry, said the opposition was not to eastern European workers improving their wages, but to a “one size fits all” arrangement for Europe.

Lizette Risgaard, president of the Danish trade union confederation, said: “The wage-setting in the so-called Danish model of collective bargaining is based on negotiations between the social partners, and productivity and innovation are crucial elements in these negotiations.

“The precondition for the Danish model is great support from both workers and companies, and wage statistics show that the Danish model in general ensures that most workers in Denmark receive a wage that is both decent and can provide a good standard of living.

“A parallel system based on statutory minimum wage or universal coverage of collective agreements does not ensure that all workers receive a wage ensuring a decent standard of living. The Danish Confederation of Trade Unions therefore fears that a statutory minimum wage can weaken the effectiveness of the Danish model.”

The commission will not determine a wage level, but wants to find agreement on a set of criteria to be met when governments set their minimum salaries.

Bulgaria’s current minimum wage for a full time worker is €286 a month compared with €2,071 a month in Luxembourg.

The commission’s aim is to ensure member states set a minimum wage equivalent to 60% of the median salary in that country.

Schmit, a former employment minister in Luxembourg, said the commission’s minimum proposal would address wage inequality within the bloc.

He told the Guardian: “The number of people in employment in the EU is at a record high. But many working people still struggle to make ends meet and can even find themselves slipping into poverty.

“It’s essential that workers have a fair wage that provides for a decent standard of living, a key principle enshrined in the European Pillar of Social Rights.

“Some member states have developed already high standards when it comes to wage setting which are now integral to their social fabrics, including through strong social dialogue and collective bargaining.

“Promoting high standards on wages could support the kind of upward economic and social convergence – the race to the top – that helps to boost the EU’s social market economy.

“An EU framework for setting minimum wages could help to combat inequalities and to avert a destructive race to the bottom in the cost of labour. At the same time, it can help to address some of the root causes of brain-drain and cross-border social dumping – a major concern for many member states.”

The EU will be unashamedly “political” and block the City of London’s access to European markets if Boris Johnson tries to exempt the UK from its laws.

Croatia’s prime minister, Andrej Plenković, whose country is taking over the presidency of the EU, made the bloc’s intentions clear after the prime minister insisted the UK would not be aligned to the bloc’s regulations.

Asked whether the EU would use its power to switch off the City’s ability to serve European clients to gain leverage in the coming negotiations with Britain, Plenković said: “I wouldn’t go into the vocabulary of weapons but what I have learned in international and European negotiations [is] that all arguments and considerations are treated as political.”

A major issue in the EU-UK negotiations over the future relationship concerns the extent to which the British government wants to diverge from the bloc’s rules in various sectors of the economy.

The outgoing governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, said this week that it would not be appropriate for the UK to be a “rule-taker” in the field of financial services after Brexit.

The European commission president, however, warned of the economic costs of seeking a loose relationship with the EU. Ursula von der Leyen was also speaking in Zagreb following a meeting with Johnson in Downing Street.

“We have to find a good balance between divergence and being close to the single market,” she said. “There is a difference in being a member state and not. And there are trade-offs between regulatory divergence on one side and access to the single market. This room now has to be explored in the coming negotiations. In June we will take stock of the progress.”

The European commission will make a unilateral decision before the summer on whether it recognises British regulations and supervisory bodies as being sufficiently robust for its financial services sector to continue to work for EU-based clients.

The City earns about £205bn a year from European demand for financial services. Trade experts have described the so-called “equivalence” decision as vital for the UK’s financial services sector, which generates 11% of total tax revenues.

British banks, traders and insurance firms will lose their automatic “passporting” rights to work for EU clients at the end of the transition period. After 31 December 2020 they will instead be reliant on the commission providing temporary rights.

In an internal briefing for EU diplomats on Friday, commission officials said it would not be business as usual for the City of London after Brexit as a consequence.

Diplomats were advised that there was still a significant risk the City would not even be given temporary rights after what officials said would be a granular assessment.

One senior EU diplomat said: “Financial stability requires both sides to quickly agree an equivalence framework. And whilst the preference of the industry to continue on the same basis EU member states will need to be absolutely sure there is a level playing field with appropriate governance.

The source said the EU’s demands would be unprecedented. “We have to go well beyond the baseline provided in US cooperation or the more recent Swiss practice,” the diplomat said.

The commission has highlighted 40 areas where it may judge the UK’s systems to be “equivalent” but even under such a ruling access can be withdrawn or restricted on a sector by sector basis with just 30 days notice. Previous EU equivalence decisions have also been linked to broader political questions rather than being confined to technical judgments.

David Henig, the director of the UK trade policy project at the European Centre for International Political Economy, said: “Apart from access to UK fishing waters and level playing field conditions typical of trade agreements we have heard little from the EU about their price for preferential UK access or equivalence, which given they are the larger market, could be high.

“Options such as preferential access to UK labour markets and deeper ties to the EU regulatory system are bound to be considered.”

Ivan Passer, the film-maker who was a key figure in the Czech new wave and who went on to direct the thriller Cutter’s Way after emigrating to the US, has died aged 86. Variety reported that an associate of his family confirmed the news.

Passer, who was born in Prague in 1933, spent his career inextricably associated with, and to some extent overshadowed by, his friend and fellow Czech director Miloš Forman. The pair met as schoolboys and studied together at the Prague Film Academy; they both became part of a group of film-makers who took advantage of a slight weakening of the communist government’s iron grip in the late 50s and early 60s. “We were all united, one way or another, with desire to expose the regime on the screen,” Passer told the LA Times. “And we got away with it because the regime was melting.”

Passer’s main contribution to the new wave was his directorial debut Intimate Lighting (1965), a gentle, funny, observational film about a famous musician visiting a smalltown friend; he also worked on Forman’s two new wave classics, A Blonde in Love (1965) and The Fireman’s Ball (1967).

However, the events of the Prague spring in 1968, which culminated in an invasion by Warsaw Pact forces in August that year, triggered a massive clampdown on creative activity. Passer and Forman planned an escape together, and managed to cross the border with Austria in January 1969.

Passer settled in New York and made a series of films with a counterculture flavour, including Born to Win (1971) with George Segal as a hairdresser turned junkie and which provided an early role for Robert De Niro, and Law and Disorder (1974), with Carroll O’Connor and Ernest Borgnine as a pair of wannabe cops. However, Passer never achieved the same success as Forman, whose One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest won multiple Oscars in 1975.

The high point of Passer’s Hollywood career was the 1981 thriller Cutter’s Way, starring Jeff Bridges and John Heard, long regarded as a cult classic. They play two damaged men, called Bone and Cutter, who witness a murder and, led by Cutter, attempt to hunt down the man they hold responsible. Its producers, United Artists, had little faith in the film, and effectively killed it commercially, but its reputation has remained high in the years since.

Passer, however, found it hard to get films off the ground in the ensuing decades, as his brand of bleakly bittersweet comedy found less fertile territory. Much of his best known subsequent work was for TV, including an award-winning HBO film about Stalin, starring Robert Duvall, and an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, starring Armand Assante.

Passer’s final film credit was as a co-director (with Sergei Bodrov and Talgat Temenov) on the Kazakh epic Nomad: The Warrior, which was released in 2005.

John le Carré has been named the latest recipient of the $100,000 (£76,000) Olof Palme prize, an award given for an “outstanding achievement” in the spirit of the assassinated Swedish prime minister.

Won in the past by names including whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed the US government’s secret intelligence about the Vietnam war in 1971, the Olof Palme prize is intended to reward “an outstanding achievement in any of the areas of anti-racism, human rights, international understanding, peace and common security”.

Announcing Le Carré’s win early on Friday morning, the prize organisers praised the 88-year-old author, whose real name is David Cornwell, “for his engaging and humanistic opinion-making in literary form regarding the freedom of the individual and the fundamental issues of mankind.

“Attracting worldwide attention, he is constantly urging us to discuss the cynical power games of the major powers, the greed of global corporations, the irresponsible play of corrupt politicians with our health and welfare, the growing spread of international crime, the tension in the Middle East and the alarming rise of fascism and xenophobia in Europe and the US,” the organisers said, calling his career “an extraordinary contribution to the necessary fight for freedom, democracy and social justice”.

Le Carré said he would donate the winnings to the international humanitarian NGO Médecins Sans Frontières.

Le Carré, the acclaimed author of some of the last century’s most enduring works, from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, has been consistently outspoken about abuses of power in his fiction, his targets including governments, big pharma and arms dealing. Agent Running in the Field, his most recent book – which he has hinted will be his last – depicts collusion between Donald Trump’s US and the British security services with the aim of undermining the European Union.

The author has long steered clear of honours. In 2011, when he was nominated for the Man Booker International prize, he asked for his name to be withdrawn, saying that while he was “enormously flattered”, he did not compete for literary prizes.

Few authors have won the Olof Palme prize, named for the Social Democrat who led his country for 11 years and was mysteriously gunned down in a Stockholm street in 1986 after leaving the cinema. Playwright and political dissident Václav Havel won in 1989, soon before becoming president of Czechoslovakia, Danish novelist Carsten Jensen won in 2009 and the Italian journalist and author of Gomorrah Roberto Saviano won in 2011.

Le Carré will receive his award at a ceremony in Stockholm on 30 January.

Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has given a ringing endorsement to Boris Johnson and Brexit, offering a pointer as to which European capitals are likely to be friendliest to post-Brexit Britain.

Orbán said Johnson and Donald Trump were “the most courageous, the most dynamic and the most ready to effect change” of all the politicians in the world today. The admiration is mutual: it emerged this week that Tim Montgomerie, a former aide of Johnson, said he expected Britain and Hungary to forge a “special relationship” after Brexit, and praised Orbán’s thinking on the “limits of liberalism”.

Most European leaders have expressed their dismay at Brexit, but Orbán, who believes Europe is “under attack” from Muslim migrants and has claimed the Jewish Hungarian-American philanthropist and financier George Soros has a plot to destroy Europe, said he is a fan.

“They have opened this vast door of opportunities for themselves. I’m sure there is a success story that will be written there,” said Orbán, during his annual press conference in Budapest on Thursday. He implied that if Hungary had the same financial, diplomatic and military strength as Britain, it may also have considered leaving the bloc.

His comments came as Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, warned in a speech in Sweden that failure to seal a deal on trade over the next 11 months would damage the UK more than the 27 remaining member states.

“Yes, the UK represents 9% of all EU27 trade. But more significantly, the EU27 accounts for 43% of all UK exports and 50% of its imports,” Barnier said. “So, it is clear that if we fail to reach a deal, it will be more harmful for the UK than for the EU27.”

Also on Thursday, Croatia’s prime minister, Andrej Plenković, warned that negotiations over access to British waters for the EU fishing fleet had the potential to end in a repeat of the cod wars of the 1970s, when the UK was forced to deploy the Royal Navy to deal with outbreaks of violence on the seas.

Speaking as his country assumed the six-month presidency of the EU council , Plenković said he “never thought Brexit was a very bright idea”.

Orbán, however, criticised European leaders who thought Brussels held the cards in the negotiations and called on Europe to be “generous” during the next 11 months. “I think the EU misunderstands the situation, because they believe that a good relationship with UK is the Brits’ interest, but it is our interest too, the other members of the EU,” he said.

He paid a lengthy tribute to Johnson’s election victory last month. “The whole world was against him: the liberal leftist media, the global Soros network and all the tools of the pro-remain EU, but just because he and the British people believe in democracy, they’ve done it,” said Orbán.

The Hungarian prime minister has been in power since 2010, and in 2018 he won a third consecutive term. His government is in trouble with Brussels over corruption and rule of law issues, and has spent the past five years campaigning relentlessly on the supposed threat to “Christian Europe” from migration.

Orbán has promoted conspiracy theories, usually with antisemitic undertones, about the overarching influence of George Soros in Hungary and across Europe, and has also tapped into another far-right conspiracy theory, that of the “great replacement”.

He has built a fence along the country’s border with Serbia, and his government has been accused by human rights groups of starving migrants by denying them food in the transit zones where they must process asylum claims.

While all this has been criticised by rights groups and many European politicians, Montgomerie, a former journalist who was hired as a senior adviser to Johnson last September, praised the Hungarian government’s ideology, saying there was a lot for Britain to learn from Orbán, and promising close relations with the country after Brexit.

“Budapest and Hungary have been home, I think, for an awful lot of interesting early thinking on the limits of liberalism, and I think we are seeing that in the UK as well. So I hope there will be a special relationship with Hungary amongst other states,” said Montgomerie, in a speech to a thinktank in Budapest last month, comments that were posted online and first uncovered by Buzzfeed News earlier this week.

On Thursday No 10 described Montgomerie as a “former adviser” without giving a reason for his departure.