MAKING a fool of Boris Johnson is perhaps not the most arduous task in the world. Indeed, even our hapless Prime Minister manages it on a daily basis. But rarely has someone so badly exposed the Tory leader as Xavier Bettel did on Monday.
So who exactly is the Luxembourg prime minister?
Bettel was born on March 3, 1973, in Luxembourg City – where he demonstrated the influence of a small, independent nation on the European stage.
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He graduated from the the University of Nancy with a master’s degree in public and European law, followed by a post-graduate diploma in political sciences and public law. Unsurprisingly, then, he has been underwhelmed by the UK Government’s lack of “concrete proposals” for a new withdrawal deal which does not contradict the Good Friday Agreement.
From 2001 until 2013, Bettel worked as a barrister, but he has been a member of the centre to centre-right Democratic Party since 1989. He was elected to parliament for the first time in 1999 at the age of 26, becoming prime minister in 2013.
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After being re-elected for a second term last year, Bettel had led the cabinet with co-deputy prime ministers Étienne Schneider and Félix Braz.
The prime minister is Luxembourg’s first openly gay leader. He married Gauthier Destenay in 2015 after same-sex marriage legal reforms had come into effect earlier that year.
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