Ireland’s Dáil is expected today to confirm Simon Harris, 37, as successor to Leo Varadkar, who stunned the country last month when he announced his resignation as prime minister and leader of Fine Gael.
The higher education minister blitzed potential rivals to be coronated as the party’s new leader. Fine Gael’s coalition partners, Fianna Fáil and the Greens, back him to become taoiseach.
It will be the culmination of a precocious rise for a polished communicator who has rewritten the political rulebook in Ireland but is barely known in Belfast, London or Brussels.
The new taoiseach will face daunting challenges. A housing crisis and fraying public services dim the centre-right coalition’s hopes of winning an election due by next March. Farmers are chafing at environmental rules while climate activists lament missed targets. Post-Brexit relations with London are tetchyand Northern Ireland’s government is fragile. About a third of Fine Gael’s Dáil deputies are stepping down rather than face voters.
Yet Harris has reputedly yearned for this opportunity since he was a teenager. “He’s acutely and almost obsessionally ambitious,” said Shane Ross, a former Fine Gael and independent politician who served in cabinet with Harris and knew him as a newly elected legislator in 2011. “He was always in a hurry, even at that time. Very early on he declared his leadership ambitions.”
