analysis
Status: 10/20/2022 3:58 p.m
With Liz Truss, the third prime minister has failed since the Brexit vote. Your plan is to regulate the succession without elections if possible, says ARD correspondent Annette Dittert: “The Tories would be wiped out if there were new elections now.”
Liz Truss’ tenure as British Prime Minister is the shortest in modern British history. According to the conservatives, their successor should begin as early as next week – but according to Annette Dittert from the ARD Studio London not: There will probably have to be some kind of “choice behind the scenes”, i.e. one leadership election from the party ranks.
“But of course it has to be faster than last time, it took the whole summer,” says Dittert. After the resignation of Truss’s predecessor, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak fought for votes for weeks with campaign appearances in front of the party base.
The Tories want things to be different this time: “The idea is now evident that a successor should be appointed as quickly as possible with elections, which then have to go very quickly, and that Truss may remain in office for a few more days until then. ” It is already clear: “The Tories want to prevent new elections.”
“Tories want to prevent new elections”, Annette Dittert, ARD London, on Liz Truss’ resignation
tagesschau24 2:00 p.m., 20.10.2022
“Most obvious successor Sunak”
According to Dittert, the most obvious candidate for the successor would be Truss’ rival Sunak, who, although not in the party base, had the majority on his side among MPs: “That would be the easiest and fastest way – to say: ‘We’ll get Sunak again out.’ He was also finance minister until recently and can solve this crazy financial crisis in which the country is now, since Truss has been in office, more quickly and would also have more confidence in the markets.”
In the faction close to Johnson, however, Sunak was “branded as a regicide” and possibly unenforceable.
“Obliterated in new elections”
Meanwhile, according to Dittert, the opposition behind Labor leader Keir Starmer has put itself in an advantageous position: At the party conference in Liverpool recently, he “presented a party that was united behind him, which again offered the country a more social-democratic course. And in the last Labor is over 35 percent ahead of the Tories in the polls, which means they would certainly win a general election now. The Tories would be wiped out if a general election were held now.”
Given the manifold problems in the British economy, foreign policy challenges such as the war in Ukraine and a possible crisis in the national health system in winter, the next prime minister will inherit a mammoth task.