Leo Varadkar Steps Down as Ireland’s Prime Minister – One America News Network
OAN’s Abril Elfi
11:59 AM – Wednesday, March 20, 2024
Leo Varadkar has resigned as Ireland’s prime minister, and he will be stepping down in the next few weeks.
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On Wednesday, Varadkar officially announced that he would be resigning as soon as his Fine Gael party chose a successor. He added that he was stepping down for “both political and personal” reasons.
“I am resigning as president and leader of Fine Gael effective today and will resign as taoiseach as soon as my successor is able to take up that office,” Varadkar said.
“It has been the most fulfilling time of my life,” Varadkar continued.
Additionally, he also expressed the belief that his center-right party will perform better in the next elections with a new leader in place, who will reportedly assume office after the Easter holiday on March 31st.
Varadkar, 45, was the youngest politician to be elected prime minister in Ireland, and he has held the position twice, from 2017 to 2020, and again since late 2022.
Varadkar is also Ireland’s first bi-racial prime minister and the first openly homosexual individual to hold the top office in the country. In 2015, Varadkar ran a campaign to legalize same-sex marriage, and in 2018, he ran another campaign to legalize abortion.
The Fine Gael party has been lagging in the polls behind the Sinn Fein party ahead of the Irish elections that are scheduled for later this year or early in 2025.
Sinn Fein is a “Nationalist political party in Ireland. It was founded by Arthur Griffith and others in 1902, and its policy involved passive resistance to the British, withholding of taxes, and establishing an Irish ruling council,” according to britannica.com.
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