For European leaders watching Theresa May's political death throes, a sense of inevitability has been replaced by one of fear.
Rather than break the deadlock over Brexit, the departure of the British prime minister raises the prospect of what they've long considered their worst nightmare: a U.K. run by Boris Johnson, the man many inside the European Union blame for causing the mess with his campaign based on false promises and then by undermining his leader.
If May was predictable and her strategy clear, albeit flawed, many EU chiefs think of Johnson as a lying populist who wants to destroy the bloc. Privately, officials use his name as shorthand for a British government that would deliver, in their eyes, the most economically catastrophic form of Brexit — one without a U.K.-EU deal to smooth the departure.