Leo Varadkar, the gay son of an Irish nurse and a doctor born in India, became the country’s youngest-ever leader in 2017.
Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s barrier-breaking prime minister, says he will resign, days after a double referendum in which voters rejected constitutional changes his government had championed, and after years of waning public support for his political party, Fine Gael.
Citing reasons both “personal and political”, Varadkar, 45, said he would step down from the party leadership effective immediately and would continue to serve as prime minister until Fine Gael elects a new leader before the Easter break. That post is expected to be filled when the government returns on April 16.
“This is a politician who is going out on a low, in some ways,” O’Malley said, pointing to Varadkar’s own resignation speech as evidence of that. “There’s a real sense of a party that is exhausted.” Varadkar first became prime minister after his predecessor, Enda Kenny, resigned over his handling of a corruption scandal.
He was applauded for those efforts, and was seen as crucial to winning major concessions from Britain. Those included negotiating a deal with then British prime minister Boris Johnson that avoided a hard border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. “That’s not the Leo Varadkar that we saw in his previous time in that role,” said David Farrell, a professor of politics at University College Dublin. “The energy had definitely started to go out of it.”
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