The Conservative Party in the UK has a new leader. However, although she is a black woman and a former McDonald’s employee, Kemi Badenoch shares more political views with Donald Trump than with Kamala Harris.

Ms Badenoch lived in Lagos, Nigeria, until she was 16, after her parents sent her to the UK for university. “People often ask what makes me a Conservative, and there isn’t just one thing,” he said in an interview. “But part of it was being in Sussex among sniveling, middle-class North Londoners.”

Today, Ms. Badenoch is known for her vocal stance on “culture war” causes. He criticized the Black Lives Matter movement, opposed people identifying as transgender, and said “not all cultures are equally valid” when it comes to deciding who should be allowed into the UK.

These positions have sparked hopes among Conservatives that Ms Badenoch will win back voters who abandoned the Conservative Party at the last election.

“He actually reminds me of Ronald Reagan,” says Conservative local councilor Gareth Lyon. “Reagan was able to build a coalition based on what he believed in, not by fawning over and trying to make everyone happy. I saw that in Kemi.”

Many politicians will shy away from the task facing the UK’s Conservative Party: to recover from the country’s historic defeat in the July 2024 general election.

But newly elected Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is not afraid of a fight.

Ms Badenoch, the first Black woman to lead a major British political party, is known for her straightforward, no-nonsense approach that can sometimes be combative.

Many Conservatives hope his energy and staunch “anti-woke” platform will revive the flagging political fortunes of the party, which has fallen from power with a record low number of seats in parliament for the first time in 14 years.

But others fear his uncompromising and often Trumpian approach will pull the party further to the right, deepening divisions and alienating the centrist voters the party hopes to recapture.

An extremely right-wing worldview

Ms Badenoch was born in London but grew up in a wealthy family in Lagos, Nigeria. He lived there until he was 16 years old. His family then sent him to the United Kingdom to avoid the increasingly unstable political situation at home. As a teenager, Ms Badenoch worked at McDonald’s to fund her education, which earned her a degree in computer systems engineering at the University of Sussex.