Great Britain: Badenoch or Jenrick: Who will lead the Tories into the future?

After the historic defeat in the British general election, the Conservative Party is getting new leadership. Today (around 12 noon CET) the Tories want to announce who will succeed former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the top of the party and who will also become the new opposition leader in Parliament.

The candidates for election were former Economics Minister Kemi Badenoch (44), who is considered the favorite, and former Home Secretary Robert Jenrick (42), who resigned from the Sunak government in protest against an allegedly too lax migration policy. Both are attributed to the right wing of the party.

Politically there are few differences. Jenrick wants to leave the European Convention on Human Rights in order to make legal appeals against deportations impossible. Badenoch rejects this.

With the new leadership, the Conservatives would continue to transform from a center-right force into a radical right-wing populist party, said political scientist Tim Bale from Queen Mary University of London to the German Press Agency. They would continue to advocate a policy that provides for as little government interference as possible and is nationalist, anti-immigrant and directed against climate neutrality.

Right-wing course in response to the success of populists

The Tories lost large numbers of votes to both the Liberal Democrats and the right-wing populist Reform UK party in the July election. Experts now see the sharp right-wing course as a reaction to the success of reform leader Nigel Farage, who once played a key role in driving forward Brexit.

“An approach to Reform UK risks losing support from the center-right spectrum and inadvertently increasing the appeal of the more populist Farage,” political scientist Mark Garnett from Lancaster University told dpa.

Since the vote, the Conservatives have only made up 121 of the 650 MPs in the House of Commons in London. This was a disaster for one of the most successful democratic parties in Western Europe in recent decades. The elected Prime Minister Sunak announced his resignation.

Six applicants, two remained

Originally, six candidates applied for the successor. The group members voted in several rounds until only Badenoch and Jenrick remained. The estimated 200,000 party members then had the last word. The exact number is unknown. Jenrick told the BBC that turnout was quite low.

The experts do not believe that the new leadership can close the huge gap to the social democratic ruling party Labor on its own. The decisive factor is primarily the performance of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government, said Garnett.