Who is Keir Starmer, the next UK Prime Minister?

This article was originally published in English

UK voters They have decided: Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, will be the country’s next prime minister after achieving an overwhelming victory following 14 years of Conservative governments.

But, Who is Keir Starmer?

Born in 1962 in London, Starmer was human rights lawyer before becoming Director of Public Prosecutions in 2008, a position he held until 2013.

During the election campaign he has emphasized in its working class originrepeatedly mentioning during televised debates that his father was a toolmaker and his mother a nurse.

In fact, his association with left-wing politics goes back a long way, as he shares his rare first name with Keir Hardiefounder of the Labour Party in the late 19th century.

Starmer He became a member of parliament in 2015 for a constituency in Camden, north London, where in 2019 it won almost 65% of the vote, a healthy result for an election in which Labour otherwise suffered heavy defeats.

Corbyn’s successor

She became party leader in 2020, when Jeremy Corbyn, the embattled leftist who had suffered multiple election defeats, resigned.

Starmer obtained more than 56% of the votes against two other candidates, one of whom, Lisa Nandy, is now his shadow international development secretary.

Starmer has also had a long interaction with European issues, as He was Corbyn’s spokesperson for Brexit between 2016 and 2020, a period in which politics over the results of the British referendum was at its peak.

I had supported the arguments in favour of remaining in the EUand then repeatedly pressed the government to present a more developed exit strategy, or even to hold another referendum on the issue.

But he may have changed his mind. Starmer’s current election manifesto promises not to return to the single market nor to the EU customs union, although he has said he would like to improve Boris Johnson’s “botched” Brexit deal.

Pragmatic change

It is not the only area in which Starmer has taken a remarkable turn towards pragmatism as the prospect of power approached.

His recent Backtracking on £28bn pledge (33 billion euros) annually to green investments, a U-turn that he said was necessary to balance the books, was criticised by unions and environmentalists.

Nor has he managed to repair relations with the left of his own party, in particular with Corbyn, whom Starmer suspended from the party amid an anti-Semitism scandal.

Corbyn is now running against Labour as Independent candidate in the London constituency for which he has been a member of parliament since the 1980s.