Already weakened by Brexit, Northern Ireland risks entering a period of additional uncertainty, with the resignation made public, Wednesday April 28, of Arlene Foster, its prime minister and leader of the main Unionist party in the province , the DUP. Mme Foster, 50, took the initiative to announce his departure after receiving, the day before, a letter of no confidence from a majority of DUP deputies in Stormont, the Northern Irish Assembly.
In a long press release, the leader of the party since 2015 looks back on her record and specifies that she will not leave the head of the DUP until May 28 and her functions in the government by ” end of June “, while the election of a successor takes place: “The Northern Irish have been hit hard by the pandemic crisis and there is still work to be done to get out of it”, she says. Not a word, however, on the reasons for his departure.
In terms of health, the record of this combative politician, daughter of a member of the Royal Ulster Police, is rather honorable. While there are nearly 3,000 deaths from Covid-19 for 1.8 million inhabitants in Northern Ireland and the second wave this winter was just as brutal there as in the rest of the United Kingdom, Mr.me Foster somehow managed to come to an understanding with his deputy, Michelle O’Neill, to decide on cautious deconfinements, although the latter is the vice-president of Sinn Fein (Irish pro-reunification, in the exact opposite of the DUP).
Attempts at destabilization
His resignation actually has mostly to do with Brexit and the Northern Irish Protocol, that part of the divorce treaty signed between the Johnson government and Brussels at the end of 2019, which provides for a customs border in the Irish Sea, between Great Britain and North Ireland. After campaigning for Brexit in 2016, Arlene Foster largely contributed to sabotaging the solution of a “soft Brexit”, promoted by the former Prime Minister Theresa May – she however excluded the border in the Irish Sea -, then supported Mr Johnson’s “hard Brexit”, without measuring the likely consequences for the province.
The latter inherited a different status from the rest of the United Kingdom – it retains a foothold in the European internal market – and therefore customs controls. A situation considered unbearable for unionists and loyalists, allergic to any separation, even symbolic, from the rest of the country.
Coming into force – only in part – last January, this border has contributed to the return of violence in Derry, the second largest city in the country. Riots broke out there at the beginning of April, especially in the Unionist and Loyalist ranks, with an intensity rarely reached since 1998 and the end of the “Troubles”, the civil war having opposed nationalist Catholics to Protestant unionists for more than thirty years. “Arlene Foster had been facing attempts at internal destabilization for some time, with more and more members of the DUP considering that she was too weak vis-à-vis Boris Johnson”, explains Clare Rice, a specialist in Northern Irish politics at Newcastle University.
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