United Kingdom: Prime Minister Boris Johnson saves his post by winning the vote of confidence of… – 20 Minutes

How long will it last? British Prime Minister Boris Johnson won a vote of no confidence on Monday evening provoked by a revolt from his Conservative Party after the “partygate” scandal. Two and a half years after his triumphant victory at the polls, the 57-year-old leader, more more contested, remains bogged down in the “partygate” affair, the very drunken parties organized in Downing Street during the confinements. And Monday’s vote showed deep divisions within the Conservative Party. considerable group of slingers likely to paralyze the action of the government. certainly not interested in early elections”. But many commentators have pointed to the prime minister’s precarious position. “A Prime Minister with a sense of honor would look at the numbers, accept the fact that he has lost the support of a significant part of his party and think about his position, but I don’t think he will” , reacted the rebellious deputy Roger Gale. The leader of the Labor opposition, Keir Starmer, considered that he was “totally unfit for the function” and criticized “divided conservatives, busy keeping Boris Johnson in power, without a project The vote dominated Britain’s headlines on Tuesday, with the Times describing Johnson as “a wounded winner” and pointing out that Theresa May had survived a 2018 no-confidence motion by a wider margin, only to step down a few months later. “PM clings to power after vote humiliation,” said the Guardian, while the Daily Mirror, which helped expose the “Partygate” affair, simply headlined: “Party is finished, Boris”. The Financial Times, for its part, judged that his low margin “has seriously damaged him and revealed the extent of the division and animosity within his party”. Quiet for a yearBoris Johnson has so far completely refused to resign. After weeks of speculation, events came to a head on Monday morning when the vote was announced, with more than 54 MPs calling for their leader to step down. If defeated, an internal election would have been called to appoint a new leader. of the party, which would have become head of government, in a delicate context of war in Ukraine and inflation at its highest for 40 years. Victorious, Boris Johnson cannot be targeted by another motion of no confidence for a year, according to the current rules. Pleading his cause in front of his troops before the vote, he had dangled tax cuts and cuts in the administration, contrasting with the massive public interventions of recent years in favor of the pandemic, or more recently of the cost crisis. of life. A crumbled popularityDespite the accumulation of scandals and the anger of the public and its majority, Boris Johnson has maintained himself in recent months by highlighting in particular his leading role in the Western response to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. He was also helped by the lack of a clear successor in the conservative ranks, in power for 12 years, especially since the star of Finance Minister Rishi Sunak, long the darling of the party, abruptly tarnished because of his wealth and his wife’s tax arrangements. Boris Johnson’s collapse in popularity has already dealt the Tories heavy blows in local elections in early May. The majority increasingly doubt the ability of “BoJo”, booed by the crowd during the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations, to win the 2024 legislative elections. Long an asset, his whimsical, often offhand personality, now annoys many British. According to a poll published Monday by YouGov, 60% of Britons wanted the Tories to oust their leader – but only 32% of majority voters. The repercussions of “partygate” are not over either. After the police and senior civil servant Sue Gray, another investigation is planned, this one parliamentary. If the latter concludes, a priori in the fall, that Boris Johnson deceived the House of Commons by claiming not to have broken the rules, he is supposed to resign.