This Wednesday, Liz Truss will have the opportunity to prove to her camp that she must remain in her post at Downing Street. Deeply weakened, the British Prime Minister will indeed face the deputies for the first time since the abandonment in open country of her economic program.
This is only her third session of the weekly meeting of questions in Parliament, but it is already a question of political survival for Liz Truss, in this oratorical exercise for which she is much less comfortable than her predecessor Boris Johnson.
Backpedaling on tax cuts
Rejected by public opinion, challenged within her own majority, after six weeks in power, the Prime Minister is already seeing her authority reduced to shreds. In an attempt to calm the economic and political storm, the 47-year-old head of government had to almost completely reverse the massive tax cuts she had promised in the campaign this summer.
The question and answer session in Parliament will be her first speech since an interview with the BBC on Monday evening, in which she said she was “sorry” for her “mistakes”, while showing her determination to stay in power.
But is there still time to hope to rectify the situation? According to a YouGov poll, only one in ten Britons have a favorable opinion of Liz Truss, one in five among Conservative Party voters. And 55% of the members of the majority party believe that she should resign while 38% want her to remain in office. Above all, 32% want to see Boris Johnson return to power, 23% would rather see the former finance minister Rishi Sunak in Downing Street.
The crisis dates back to the presentation at the end of September of the “mini-budget” of his then Minister of Finance, Kwasi Kwarteng, consisting of massive tax cuts and colossal support for energy bills, which had raised fears of a slippage in public accounts. The pound had fallen to a historic low and long-term government borrowing rates had soared. The Bank of England had to intervene to prevent the situation from degenerating into a financial crisis.
The opposition at the top of the polls
Hastily appointed on Friday, new Finance Minister Jeremy Hunt on Monday backtracked on almost all of his predecessor’s tax cuts, giving the impression that power was now in his hands rather than the leader’s. of the government.
In addition, with two years to go before the next parliamentary elections, the Labor opposition is beating the Conservatives in the polls. Thus, five members of his party have already publicly urged Liz Truss to leave. But in the absence of an obvious successor, the Conservatives are reluctant to engage in a new and long designation process and are looking for a consensus to agree on a name, but seem far from succeeding.