Leo Varadkar

Leo Varadkar
14th Taoiseach of Ireland From: 17 December 2022 – present
Tánaiste	Micheál Martin
Predecessor	Micheál Martin
Successor	Incumbent (no successor)
14th Taoiseach of Ireland From: 14 June 2017 - 27 June 2020
Tánaiste	Frances Fitzgerald Simon Coveney
Predecessor	Edna Kenny
Successor	Micheál Martin
Information
Party	Fine Gael

Leo Varadkar (born 1979) is an Irish politician. A member of Fine Gael, he has served two terms as the Taoiseach (prime-minister) Ireland, firstly between June 2017 and June 2022 and again since December 2022. He was also Tánaiste (deputy prime-minister) between 2020 and 2022.

Career

Aged 20, he was an unsuccessful candidate in the 1999 local elections in Ireland. Varadkar was elected to Fingal County Council in 2004.

He was first elected to the Dáil Éireann, Ireland's national legislature, in 2007 to represent the constituency of Dublin West. He remains TD for the seat to this day.

He became 14th Taoiseach of Ireland on 14 June 2017, at the age of 38. At the time, it was widely reported that Varadkar was the youngest person to hold that position, and the first homosexual to do so. Earlier that month, Varadkar won the Fine Gael leadership contest and was later confirmed as Taoiseach in the Dáil Éireann, Ireland's lower legislative chamber, by 57 votes to 50 with 47 abstentions.

On 5 August 2017, Varadkar bragged at a "pride" event that it was "only a matter of time" before homosexual "marriage" was legalised in Northern Ireland. As of 2017, the province was the only part of the UK in which same-sex "marriage" was still illegal.

On 16 January 2020, Leo Varadkar launched Fine Gael's latest economic plan. Varadkar promised higher wages, tax cuts on average wages and the creation of 200k new jobs by 2025.

On 11 March 2020, Leo Varadkar made the vastly off the mark prediction that 85,000 people may die from the Chinese Communist Party pandemic in Ireland and that the virus had a death rate of around 3.4%. In reality, by 2023 only around a tenth of the predicted figure died from COVID-19 in Ireland.

After serving nearly 3 years as Tánaiste, Leo Varadkar returned to the position of Taoiseach on Saturday, 17 December 2022. He was elected to the position following an 87–62 vote in the Dáil Éireann following a formal nomination by the President.

Leo Varadkar said on 10 May 2023 that he believed that a government led by Sinn Fein, a terrorist 'political party' and hate group who form the political wing of the IRA, would "make [Ireland] poorer, less secure and less influential in the world". However, he also used this stance to attack Brexit.

Views and policy

Despite Fine Gael's claims to be a "conservative party", there is little, beyond moderate fiscal conservatism, about Varadkar's political ideology that can be called conservative. He is blatantly liberal; in 2018, he called a referendum on the legalization of killing unborn children in Ireland, in which the anti-life side won. He also supports same-sex marriage.

Personal life

Varadkar is gay.

Varadkar stated in a 2020 social media post that he isn't religious, but grew up Catholic and finds faith and religion "interesting".