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DUBLIN — Democratic Unionist leader Arlene Foster faces being ousted from atop Northern Ireland’s main Protestant party after most colleagues backed a no-confidence motion against her.
The intensifying effort to remove Foster faces an internal party deadline of Friday, when Democratic Unionist rules require her to be reconfirmed — or rejected — to serve as leader for another year.
While the party has not officially commented on the circulation of a letter seeking Foster’s resignation, two senior DUP members have confirmed to POLITICO that at least 22 of Foster’s 27 party colleagues in the Northern Ireland Assembly have signed it. They said at least four of the party’s eight members in the House of Commons also want her out, although two of the most prominent MPs, Sammy Wilson and Gregory Campbell, have not signed the document.
Retaining the leadership requires majority backing from Assembly and Commons members in the DUP, a party that has never had an open leadership contest in its 50-year history.
Four party sources said it was a question of when, not if, Foster would resign or be replaced. None see a path for her to retain the leadership.
“She’s a dead woman walking,” said one DUP Assembly member. “This has been building against Arlene for a long time. It’s reached critical mass with her poor handling of the Northern Ireland protocol. There’s no scenario where she stays in post. We simply can’t go into elections with her in charge.”
Foster, who succeeded Peter Robinson as DUP leader and Northern Ireland’s first minister five years ago, has declined to comment since news of the letter seeking her resignation broke Tuesday night.
Within the hour, she canceled a planned meeting with the U.K.’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Brandon Lewis, and her Catholic counterpart atop the power-sharing government, Deputy First Minister Michelle O’Neill from the Irish nationalist Sinn Féin.
The crisis risks collapsing Northern Ireland’s five-party administration, a fragile achievement of the 1998 Good Friday peace accord that sought lasting compromise following three decades of sectarian bloodshed that left 3,700 dead.
But sustaining that balance has proved elusive under Foster, a verbally combative figure who at times fails to conceal her loathing of Sinn Féin and its retired paramilitary arm, the Provisional IRA. Such tensions reflect the terror experienced in her childhood, when the Irish Republican Army shot and severely wounded her father on their border farm when she was 8, and bombed her school bus when she was a teenager, seriously wounding the girl beside her.
Power-sharing has been suspended during most of her tenure as DUP leader, being revived only in January 2020. Its rules require the largest Assembly party, currently the Democratic Unionists, to fill the top post.
Foster has faced rising internal criticism over her handling of the Northern Ireland protocol, a key element of the post-Brexit trade deal between the U.K. and EU. It required Northern Ireland to stay within the EU single market while the rest of the U.K. departed, an outcome that has left unionists feeling betrayed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Unlike many DUP colleagues, Foster initially expressed lukewarm support for the protocol, noting it offered a unique advantage for Northern Ireland exporters to trade barrier-free both with Britain and the EU.
Foster reversed course once the protocol became reality in January and goods arriving from Britain started to face complex EU customs and sanitary hurdles at Northern Ireland ports.
The DUP’s belated campaign to undermine and legally challenge the protocol includes an effective boycott on meetings with the Irish government.
But only last week, even as other DUP ministers kept failing to appear and forced a string of those cross-border meetings to be canceled, Foster confused and exasperated colleagues by claiming in the Assembly that such disruption wasn’t party policy. One DUP colleague told POLITICO that performance, for him, had been the final straw.
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