After her victory in the Conservative Party vote on Monday, Liz Truss is on track to become British Prime Minister. Hopefully, she will take office on Tuesday, after meeting Queen Elizabeth II during her holiday stay and getting her the green light to set up a government.
Truss, the British foreign minister, emerged victorious in the race to replace the scandalous Boris Johnson at the helm of the Conservative Party and assume the post of Prime Minister of the country. Truss got the 57% of the votes of Conservative memberscompared to 43% of former Treasury chief Rishi Sunak.
Truss, 47, will become Britain’s third female prime minister, after Thatcher, who ruled from 1979 to 1990, and Theresa May, who served from 2016 to 2019.
From young liberal to Thatcher admirer
Although Truss participated in demonstrations against Thatcher during her childhood, as an adult came to admire the first female leader From Great Britain. Now, about to enter 10 Downing St., she looks ready to fight an anxiety Thatcherian to transform the UK.
Conservative Party members have embraced Truss’s promises to cut taxes and red tape and maintain Britain’s unconditional support for Ukraine.
Some see echoes of the Iron Lady – as Thatcher was known – in Truss’s vision of a “web of freedom” linking democracies around the world.
For critics, Truss is a inflexible ideologue whose right-wing policies will not help Britain overcome the economic turmoil caused by the pandemic, Brexit and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Mark Littlewood, a libertarian commentator who has known Truss since college, said the new British leader is not so much a conservative as a “radical” who, like Thatcher, wants to “reduce state intervention” in people’s lives.
“I expect a lot of controversy and a lot of action,” Littlewood said.
An austere and liberal past
Born in Oxford in 1975, Mary Elizabeth Truss is the daughter of a math teacher and a nurse. Her parents took her as a child to the protests against nuclear power and against Thatcherwhere he remembers yelling, “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie: get out, get out, get out!”
In a 2018 speech, he said he started developing his own political views at a young age, “arguing against my parents. socialists in our sinister home“.
The family lived in Paisley, Scotland before moving to Leeds in the north of England, where Truss attended a public secondary school, distinguishing her from her many conservative colleagues with private education.
During the leadership campaign, Truss highlighted his relatively modest background. But she angered some former classmates and teachers when he said the students at his school were “disappointed with low expectations, poor education and lack of opportunities.” Alumni of the school include academics, judges and various other Members of Parliament.
Truss went to the University of Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics, the career of choice for many aspiring politicians. She was president of the university section of the Liberal Democratic Party.
Truss was an enthusiastic member of the party, which is economically centrist and supports constitutional reform and civil liberties. Truss posted signs of Free the grass who campaigned for the decriminalization of marijuana, and in a speech called for the abolition of the monarchy.
After Oxford, Truss joined the Conservative Party, “when it wasn’t fashionable,” he later said.
His beginnings in politics
He has worked as an economist for Shell and the telecommunications company Cable and Wireless. He was also part of a center-right think tank, while involved in conservative politics and defended the views Thatcherite free market.
She was a London councilor and ran unsuccessfully twice for Parliament before being elected to represent the southwestern seat of Norfolk, east England, in 2010.
He won the seat, which is safe for Conservatives, after a bump in the street: some local Conservatives were outraged when it was revealed that he had been having an affair with another MP when they were both married to other people.
Truss managed to outlive her critics and her marriage survived. Together with her husband Hugh O’Leary, an accountant, she has two teenage daughters.
he founded the group Free enterprisea collection of Tory lawmakers Thatcherites who wrote “Britannia Unchained”, a political treatise that included the incendiary claim that British workers are “among the laziest in the world”.
David Laws, a former cabinet minister who worked with Truss in the government ten years ago, remembers her as a strong person and “incredibly ambitious“, comparing her in his memoirs to” a young Margaret Thatcher at full throttle “.
Truss won his first cabinet position as Secretary for Food and the Environment in 2014, making his biggest impression with a much derided speech in which he thundered that it was “a disgrace” that Britain imported two-thirds of the money. his cheese.
In the 2016 UK referendum on leaving the European Union, Truss argued for permanence, even though she says she has always been a natural Eurosceptic. After the vote, she won over the Brexiteers with her uncompromising approach to the EU.
She rose to the post of Secretary of Justice, but May demoted her to a more supportive role at the Treasury in 2017. When May was overthrown for her repeated failure to break the political stalemate on Brexit, Truss he was one of the first to support Boris Johnson to replace it.
When he won, Johnson named Truss Secretary of Commerce, a role in which he traveled the world signing post-Brexit trade deals and raising his profile.
Criticism and praise for your work
In September 2021 she was appointed foreign minister, head of British diplomacy. Her performance garnered mixed reviews. Many of her praise her strong response to the invasion of Ukraine and secured the release of two British citizens imprisoned in Iranwhere his predecessors had failed.
But EU leaders and officials who hoped it would soften Britain’s relations with the bloc were disappointed.
Among the commercial disputes, Truss introduced legislation a breaking of parts of the binding agreement between the UK and the EU signed by both parties. The 27-nation bloc has taken legal action against Great Britain.
Truss has at times suggested that Thatcher’s frequent confrontations are sexist, but at other times he has encouraged them. She posed on a British Army tank in Eastern Europe, conjuring up an image of Thatcher during the Cold War. In a televised leadership debate, Truss wore a blouse with a bow like the one Thatcher wore.
Highlighting her modest background, evoking comparisons with Thatcher (who was the daughter of a grocer), said Victoria Honeyman, associate professor of British politics at the University of Leeds: working class girl doing good“.
Truss’s personality hides behind a stern public image. His friends of him say he has a funny side rarely seen in publicand those who like karaoke and explosive songs by Taylor Swift, Whitney Houston and Destiny’s Child.
Source: AP
Source: Clarin
