Son of an immigrant and against refugees, Who is Rishi Sunak, the new British Conservative leader?

The road is paved for Rishi Sunak to become the first British Prime Minister of Indian origin after all his rivals in the leadership race of the ruling Conservative Party withdrew. Meanwhile, Sunak promises to implement anti-immigrant policies and expand deportation procedures.

After his failure last September, Richie Sunak succeeded in becoming the leader of the Conservative Party, and thus the first Indian Prime Minister in Britain. That is after the party's elections on Monday, from which all the candidates withdrew, leaving the road paved for Sunak towards his leadership.

On the other hand, despite being of foreign origin and the son of a family with an immigrant background, Sunak is a self-proclaimed anti-refugee, promising to implement broad policies to combat refugee waves and expand the deportation procedures established by his predecessor Johnson. In addition to this, he had previously ignored numerous complaints by Muslim actors of Islamophobia in the country, which led many to accuse him of normalizing with that racist discourse.

New Downing Street resident

Earlier in the afternoon, Conservative Party leadership candidate Penny Mordaunt announced her withdrawal from the race to make way for Sunak to win the post. "These are unprecedented times. Despite the tight time in the party leadership contest, colleagues clearly felt we needed certainty today," Mordaunt said in a statement, adding, "They (party members) made this decision in good faith for the good of the country."

And before that on Sunday, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that he was withdrawing his candidacy for the Conservative leadership, after he had intended to return to the post he left last July. Johnson justified his withdrawal with his commitment to "maintain party unity" and that his ambition to return to Downing Street "simply wouldn't be the right thing to do".

This paved the way for former Finance Minister Rishi Sunak to win the party leadership and then the British Prime Minister after obtaining 155 deputies. After his victory was announced , Sunak said : "The time for internal debates in the party is over (...) We need to focus on politics, not personalities, and I appeal to you to work for unity," vowing to work daily "to help the British people."

Who is Rishi Sunak?

Born in 1980 in Southupton on the south coast of England, Rishi Sunak is the eldest of the three sons of an Indian family, and if he succeeds in winning the Conservative leadership position, he will be the first British Prime Minister of Indian origin.

Sunak was educated at the prestigious Winchester Boarding School, and from there to the universities of Oxford in Britain and Stanford in the United States, where he studied politics and economics. As for his career, he succeeded in occupying several positions in major financial companies of the caliber of Goldman Sachs, and established his own investment company.

Richie Sunak began his political career in 2015 as a national team representative from North Yorkshire. And in 2016, he was one of the first to support the pro-Brexit camp, a choice that earned him the preference of Boris Johnson, who was offered by the Ministry of Finance in 2020 at the age of no more than 39 years.

During his tenure as finance minister, Sunak gained great popularity by allocating a huge budget for benefits to citizens during the health pandemic, and he was one of the first to resign from the government following the outbreak of a scandal that its president, Boris Johnson, had covered up information about sexual abuse by a Conservative MP.

Against refugees and ignores Islamophobia

This time, Richie Sunak was not able to argue with his electoral program and wave his promises to party members in order to attract their votes in his favour, because the victory became decided before running in the elections following the withdrawal of all his competitors. While that program and those promises are not unknown to most conservatives, only two months have passed since the political battle that raged between the new leader and his predecessor, Liz Truss.

For a party that considers the issue of immigrants a major issue in its politics, Sunak's orientations did not deviate from that line. During the previous campaign, he emphasized more than once his determination to work to curb the country's reception of refugees and immigrants, and to tighten reception procedures in exchange for expanding the deportation law to Rwanda enacted by his predecessor, Boris Johnson.

Sunak promised at the time that he would do "whatever it takes" for the success of the scheme to deport the refugees to Rwanda, and gave Parliament the power to decide who would be receiving refugees on the territory of the Kingdom. As he has already said: "Our immigration system is broken and we have to be honest about that. Whether you think immigration should be high or low, we can all agree that it should be legal and controlled."

Sunak pledged that he would refocus the anti-terror plan on "Islamists" and add the adjective "distorting the kingdom" to the concept of extremism, stressing "redoubling efforts to confront Islamic extremism", without referring to the escalating threat of far-right terrorism in his declaration.

This is what a spokesman for the "Muslim Council of Britain" Miqdad Versi described that Sunak "wants to punish the wrong person, and only ordinary British Muslims will be victims of this new policy." He wondered if this policy "will include those who hold political views against the colonial history of our nation or who hate the monarchy, the national anthem, or even one of our national sports teams?"