Victim of a sling in her party linked to the consequences of Brexit on the British province, the Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Arlene Foster, announced her resignation on Wednesday April 28. This supporter convinced of the union of her province with the British Crown, with a key role in the negotiations on the exit of the United Kingdom, announced that she would leave the head of her party, the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party), at the end of May, and his post as head of local government at the end of June, in a statement released by his party. “Once he is elected, I will work with the new leader on the arrangements for the transition”, specified Mme Foster.
His departure comes at a difficult time for Northern Ireland, where Brexit has awakened community tensions at the origin of the “Troubles”, the three decades of violence between Catholics in favor of reunification with Ireland and Protestants in favor of the British Crown. These clashes, in which the British army intervened, left some 3,500 dead until the Good Friday peace agreement in 1998.
Customs controls
Arlene Foster, 50, was once again prime minister of Northern Ireland in January 2020, having previously had to step down from her post, embroiled in a scandal over the management of renewable energy subsidies. During the Brexit negotiations, the role of kingmaker of the DUP in the Parliament of London, where he assured a fragile majority in the government of Theresa May, had allowed him to influence the negotiations with Brussels, the party calling for a separation clear and crisp with the EU. London and Brussels had come to an agreement on a solution, called “the Northern Irish Protocol”.
But after the landslide victory of Boris Johnson’s conservatives in the 2019 legislative elections, which ended the role of the DUP, this lawyer by training was unable to prevent the establishment of customs controls between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Brittany. This provision provided for by the Brexit agreement creates a customs border in the Irish Sea to prevent the return of a separation between the province and the Republic of Ireland, a member of the EU.
The postponement of most of the controls decided unilaterally by London did not prevent the anger of the Unionists, to the point of provoking ten days of riots in early April, of unprecedented violence for years. Water drop feeding the slingshot: M’s decisionme Foster to abstain during the vote, in April, by the local Parliament of a motion calling for a ban on conversion therapy for homosexuals, an attitude considered too timid by the most fundamentalists of his training, with the ultra-conservative vision in the chapter of manners.
