British Conservative Party to elect next British Conservative leader

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London, Oct 21.- The British Conservative Party launched for the second time in the last four months the internal process to choose a new leader and prime minister after the resignation of Liz Truss.

But unlike last time selecting a replacement for Boris Johnson, this time the Conservatives will have just a week to decide who will be the new prime minister.

In order to speed up the selection process, it was decided that each candidate must have the support of at least 100 of the 357 members of the parliamentary caucus, which reduces the number of possible candidates to three.

On Monday, once the contenders have been defined, the “Tory” deputies will hold a first round of elimination to leave only two of them, who will ultimately submit to an online vote by the rest of the party members, who are about 170 thousand in number.

However, if the second candidate withdraws from the race, then it would not be necessary to seek the consent of the entire membership, and the new prime minister and party leader would assume both positions before October 28th.

Among the possible replacements for Truss, who was barely 44 days at the head of the country and the Conservatives, are former Treasury Minister Rishi Sunak, the current leader of the Conservative Party, Penny Mordaunt, and Johnson himself.

The possible candidacy of Johnson, who was forced to resign last July after a series of scandals that questioned his leadership capacity and ethical principles, arouses conflicting opinions; on the one hand, his followers consider that he would be the ideal person to put the Conservative Party back on track after the financial chaos caused by Truss’s economic plan, but his detractors believe that his return to Downing Street would be equivalent to handing over power to Labor in the general elections planned for the end of 2024. (PL)