Reaction to election debacle: Australia’s conservatives for the first time vote for the boss

For the first time in their 80-year history, the conservatives in Australia chose a woman to the party leadership. The previous Vice Chair Sussan Ley is to lead the Liberal Party out of the crisis after the crashing defeat in the parliamentary election at the beginning of the month. The 63-year-old was considered the favorite of the moderate camp and follows the hapless opposition leader Peter Dutton. He had been identified as the main person responsible for the election debacle, which helped the social democratic Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to take a second term.

The conservative alliance of liberal and national, comparable to the Union from the CDU and CSU in Germany, had achieved a historically bad result in the election on May 3 and lost almost half of the seats in parliament. The right camp in the party insisted on a more radical course after the fiasco that is more oriented towards the policy of US President Donald Trump – according to opinion researchers, the voters had also largely decided on Albanese’s laboratory party because they were more apart from Trump than the liberals with Dutton.

Ley resigned as Minister of Health in 2017 after completing the private purchase of an apartment during a trip financed by the taxpayer to the Gold Coast and thus triggering an outrage. The daughter of British parents, born in Nigeria and grew up in the United Arab Emirates, had only moved to Australia with her family at the age of 13. She later gave up her British citizenship.