‘Europe is dead . . . long live Europe?’: World media reacts to Brexit

After Bild's one-word reaction to Brexit on Saturday – Outsch! – the German tabloid's Sunday edition called for calm. Just because Britain had shown Europe the red card it had not become the continent's enemy.

Echoing the arguments of German chancellor Angela Merkel, Bild am Sonntag said cool heads were needed to avoid the Brexit crisis turning into a catastrophe.

“It will become a catastrophe if we Europeans act like a revenge-seeking abandoned wife: ‘You don’t want me any more? Then take your things now and go. You’re dead to me. And you’ll never see the children again either, I’ll ruin you.’”

Der Spiegel weekly announced succinctly: "Europe is dead", adding in smaller type: "Long live Europe?"

The Frankfurter Allgemeine argued on Sunday that the Brexit momentum had fed off the euro crisis and its many political failures – the failure of German fiscal discipline through Maastricht rules and the failure of French crisis proposals to secure greater democratic and economic collectivisation.

One columnist, former Deutsche Bank chief economist Thomas Mayer, wrote: "Existing EU programmes now have to be tested for their citizen-compatibility."

Vienna's Der Standard warned it would take little for Austria's largest party, the populist Freedom Party, to latch on to the 45 per cent of voters who believe their country would be better outside the union. It called for an open debate about what the EU should be in future – a common market or a political union.

“Citizens – or at least the directly-elected parliamentarians – have to receive more rights of co-determination,” wrote its editor Alexandra Föderl-Schmid. “Only when its citizens help to carry the EU has the project a future.”

Switzerland's Neue Zürcher Zeitung noted dispassionately that "the long and fickle history of Britain's relationship to the European unification project has ended in divorce. There's no script for what will happen after this leap into the unknown following the narrow referendum," it added. "At the moment, the only certain thing is the uncertainty Brexit has caused."

In France, foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told Le Journal du Dimanche that the vote was a "brutal shock".

“Now everyone is afraid of the shock wave of populist forces,” he said. “We have to move fast . . . show we’ve understood the message of the peoples. The future of France in Europe, with or without Europe, will be the question of the presidential election campaign.”

Le Monde worried that the UK might yet take its revenge on the EU. "The risk is that the UK and its financial centre may engage in particularly aggressive fiscal and regulatory dumping, to make itself the tax haven of Europe, even more porous and complacent than it is today towards dirty money."

Political implications

Italy’s

Corriere della Sera

described the result as a “Blow to Europe”. Economy minister

Pier Carlo Padoan

said the political implications concerned him: that Brexit “thrusts towards a disintegration of Europe”. The right-wing

Il Giornale

, owned by former prime minister

Silvio Berlusconi

, argued that the Leave vote was “a predictable slap to the establishment” and an example of “how Islam is breaking up Europe”.

Poland's Gazeta Wyborcza argued the vote could accelerate integration among core EU members, "if the EU can shake off its fear of populists". "Poland, which will keep the zloty, will be outside the hard [integrationist] core."

In the US, the New Yorker summed up developments by rushing out a cover showing a Cleese-esque British minister, silly walking off a cliff.