Eoin O’Malley, an associate professor in political science at Dublin City University, said that while Varadkar’s announcement was surprising, the party hadn’t been in a strong position politically for some time.

“This is a politician who is going out on a low, in some ways,” O’Malley said, pointing to Varadkar’s own resignation speech as evidence of that. “There’s a real sense of a party that is exhausted.”

In the past few months, about one-third of Fine Gael’s MPs have announced they’re retiring from politics before the 2025 election.

And while there is no clear successor waiting in the wings, Varadkar may have decided to resign because he believes “a younger, more vibrant leader might be the best chance for that party to try and present a new picture,” O’Malley added.

Varadkar first became prime minister after his predecessor, Enda Kenny, resigned over his handling of a corruption scandal.

A former health minister, he oversaw a 2018 referendum that rolled back the country’s ban on abortion, one of a number of measures that reshaped Ireland’s Constitution in ways that reflected its more secular and liberal modern identity. After the coalition government came to power in June 2020, he served as deputy prime minister before again moving into the leadership role as part of the power-sharing agreement.

Much of Varadkar’s work since that time, and in the latter half of his first premiership, focused on navigating a post-Brexit landscape that threatened to undermine the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that had forged decades of peace on the island.

He was applauded for those efforts, and was seen as crucial to winning major concessions from Britain. Those included negotiating a deal with then British prime minister Boris Johnson that avoided a hard border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland.

At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Varadkar, who had trained as a doctor before becoming a politician, rejoined the medical register to work part-time.

But Varadkar’s return to the political leadership role in 2022 – even after his party had fallen to third place in the last election – had been in many ways an unexpected and challenging second act.

“That’s not the Leo Varadkar that we saw in his previous time in that role,” said David Farrell, a professor of politics at University College Dublin. “The energy had definitely started to go out of it.”

Ireland faces a number of domestic challenges, including a severe housing shortage caused partly by the failure of successive governments to invest in affordable housing and a cost-of-living crisis that has deepened deprivation.

Amid a sharp rise in asylum-seekers arriving in the country, the government has also had to contend with a growing anti-immigration backlash that has increasingly spilled over into violence, driven in part by far-right rhetoric. Arsonists have targeted planned housing for asylum-seekers, and a violent riot in Dublin late last year drew international attention.

Varadkar recently faced criticism for the failed campaign on the double referendum this month that the coalition government had expected to win. Voters rejected two proposed changes to the Constitution that would have removed language about women’s duties being in the home and broadened the definition of family beyond marriage.

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Analysts said the results partly reflected a weak campaign for the amendments, confusion over the proposals and a lower-than-expected voter turnout that cast a spotlight on the government’s approach.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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