Broad support, but no clean slate – as Rishi Sunak typifies Haiti – as the former jewel of the Caribbean fell into chaos

If Boris Johnson’s successor had been chosen like Liz Truss’s, Rishi Sunak would have long sat at 10 Downing Street. able to rally most Conservative MPs behind it, but not the party base. The latter decided, and Sunak had to admit defeat at the time.

Now it was different: With Boris Johnson and Penny Mordaunt, both competitors gave up. “Rishi has my full support,” Mordaunt wrote on Twitter Monday. The 42-year-old Sunak is thus confirmed as the new party leader of the Tories and at the same time as the new prime minister.

Sunak gathered supporters – also from the Johnson camp

The party members actually had to choose between the two or even three candidates who would have had the support of more than 100 MPs. Sunak, who was previously the Chancellor of the Exchequer under Johnson, recently had far more than the required 100 MPs.

His advantage: he could unite Tories from different party wings behind him. His supporters included Grant Shapps, who helped lead the Johnson campaign to success in 2019, and Dominic Raab, Johnson’s former deputy prime minister and Brexit secretary, as well as trade secretary Kemi Badenoch and ex-Home Secretary Suella Braverman. the extreme right-wing political party.

After Johnson’s withdrawal, some of his supporters moved to the Sunak camp: Secretary of State James Cleverly wrote on Twitter Monday morning that Sunak had the most experience and could count on his support. Former Interior Minister Priti Patel also spoke out in favor of Sunak.

Sunak wants to deliver

The 42-year-old benefits from predicting the fallout from Truss’s economic plans – this is a fairy tale, Sunak said during the election campaign. His idea for tax policy is practically the opposite:

He wants to lower the lower income tax rate — but not right away, because of inflation. However, corporate taxes are going up. Truss, on the other hand, planned to cut taxes on the rich and cancel the planned corporate tax hike – the catastrophic reaction of the financial markets prompted her resignation.

Sunak now wants to “restore the economy”, “unite the party” and “deliver for the country,” he wrote on Twitter on Sunday, announcing his candidacy.

But Sunak will have to prove himself, not only in the financial markets but also within the party. To many, he is considered the proverbial “King Killer”. Because it was his resignation as Treasury Secretary that sparked the insurgency within the party that forced Boris Johnson to resign over the summer. As a result, some Tories still consider him a traitor.

Rise story with cracks

And he also has a hard time in public. Sunak is Hindu, the country’s first non-white prime minister, and presents himself as a climber from an immigrant family. His grandparents were from Punjab, a former province of British India in what is now India and Pakistan.

His parents were born in Tanzania and Kenya respectively. In the 1960s, the families moved to Southampton, where his mother worked as a pharmacist and his father as a doctor. Sunak studied at the elite universities of Oxford and Stanford in the United States.

There he met his future wife Akshata Murthy, daughter of a billionaire Indian IT entrepreneur. He has two daughters with her. Before his political career, Sunak worked in the financial world, including at the investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Sunak himself says in a video about his candidacy over the summer: “My family has given me opportunities they could only dream of.” He became a politician because everyone in Britain should have the opportunity to give their children a better future.

With Prada on the construction site

But his rise to fame quickly broke: excerpts from a BBC documentary circulated online showing Sunak in his early twenties. In it he talks about having friends from the upper class or with aristocratic titles, but none from the working class. He also likes to encourage children from state schools to later apply to Oxford. As a student, he was in an elite boarding school.

In the class-conscious kingdom, such statements are not exactly iconic. Suddenly, Sunak seemed less of a likeable climber and more of a career-maker who lacked traction early on. This image was confirmed when in July, when visiting a construction site, his choice of footwear was noticed: loafers from the luxury brand Prada for more than 500 euros.

In the summer he and his wife also appeared for the first time on the “Rich List” of the newspaper “The Times”: with a combined fortune of 730 million pounds (about 841 million euros) they ended up in place 222 of the richest British.

To find Sunak, who was then her finance minister, on the list annoyed many Britons – especially since it had only become public weeks before that his wife had been dodging millions of dollars in taxes for years. She was not officially registered in the UK – a legal practice. But the opposition Labor party accused Sunak of hypocrisy.

At the same time, he was also fined in the course of the ‘Partygate’ affair: Together with Johnson and other members of the government, he had broken Corona rules in June 2020 when they celebrated the Prime Minister’s birthday together. Sunak’s poll figures fell after he actually gained a lot of popularity during the pandemic: unlike the conservative party line, he took on new debts as finance minister, partly to secure many jobs.

Second chance as third choice

So Sunak mainly benefits from the misbehavior of his predecessors: his second chance now leads him to office – after Johnson and Truss, he is, as it were, the third choice of the Tories. He is not elected by the people.

With the exception of the financial policy area, his tenure is unlikely to bring about a major turnaround: The self-proclaimed Brexit supporter wants to accelerate the violation of the Northern Ireland Protocol – a move that will affect relations with the European Union. He wants to limit the number of refugees in Great Britain and promote the admission agreement with the African state of Rwanda. He supports the aid to Ukraine and wants to lower the VAT on energy.

His biggest challenge will likely be to reunite the divided Tories: “You can’t govern effectively if you don’t have a united party in parliament,” said Boris Johnson, explaining his withdrawal. This mammoth task is now assigned to Sunak.

sources:

((hey, that))