The deputies of the Northern Irish unionist party DUP vote this Friday to choose their new leader and determine who will be the next prime minister of this British region after the resignation of Arlene Foster, victim of an internal rebellion related to Brexit.
The online voting, reserved for the 36 deputies that the formation has in the autonomous regional and national Parliament of London, opened at 11.00 local time (10.00 GMT). The result is expected around 4:00 p.m. GMT.
Foster, 50, announced just over two weeks ago that she would step down as party leader at the end of May and as head of the regional government a month later.
It was the subject of a rebellion within this ultra-conservative formation, which accuses it of not having prevented the creation of an administrative border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom in the framework of Brexit.
Two candidates are vying for his succession: the Northern Irish Minister of Agriculture, Edwin Poots, who is the favorite, and the representative of the DUP in London Jeffrey Donaldson, 58 years old. The winner will designate the new head of the regional government.
Poots, 55, is a creationist who rejects the theory of evolution and is convinced that the world was created 4,000 years before Christ. It has also taken a hard line against the “Northern Irish Protocol” that after Brexit keeps Northern Ireland in the European single market and its customs union.
This solution seeks to avoid imposing a border with the neighboring Republic of Ireland, a member of the European Union, and threatens the fragile Good Friday Peace Agreement that in 1998 ended three decades of bloody conflict between Protestant unionists and Catholic Republicans.
The DUP denounces that this is equivalent to introducing a border in the Irish Sea, within the United Kingdom itself.
Unionist anger against the protocol helped trigger ten nights of violent unrest in Northern Ireland in early April, in which 88 police officers were injured.
Poots has already announced that if he wins, he does not want to be regional prime minister, but would appoint someone else.
According to the BBC, Donaldson, considered a little more moderate, defends greater opposition to the Northern Irish protocol, even if that means that the regional executive that they share with the Sinn Féin Republicans by the 1998 agreement falls.
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