Ah, that's interesting. In what way is he right-wing? I know Fine Gael have always been soft-centre-right and a little less nationalistic than FF or SF, but frankly, I'd never even heard of him before today.
Can you give us a bit of background to this new player on the global stage?
Basically, for various historical and practical reasons, Irish politics has always been very populist and pragmatic, with ideology taking a back seat. This was just amplified with partition, which really removed a lot of the ideological diversity that we had. Then, in the aftermath of the Civil War they implemented Single Tranferable Vote to try and keep everyone enfranchised. Whilst STV is very good for making the parliament representative, it also means that politicians have to get as many votes as humanely possible. For the most part of the last century, that meant being devoutly Catholic and thus, conservative socially. However, it also meant many governments were quite left wing economically. It is an onrunning tradition of Irish politics that every government runs the budget in such a way that in the last budget before an election, they go on a spending spree, effectively buying votes. Fianna Fáil were masters of this and they dominated politics like the Republicans did during the Reagan era or the ANC currently does in South Africa.
Three things have effectively caused Varadkar. One is the increasingly liberal nature of the electorate. Internationally people like to emphasise his Indian heritage. But Ireland never really picked up that much racism in the first place, partly due to the fact that Catholics knew full well what it felt like to be institutionally discriminated against and partly due to the simple abscence of ethnic minorities for the most part. As for homosexuality, that simply changed due to massive outside investment, which turned Ireland from one of Europe's poorest states into one of the richest within the space of a few decades. At the start of the last century, what is now the Republic had basically NO industry whatsoever. People outside of Ireland just don't realise how steep of a learning curve Ireland has had to go through.
The second feature that has caused Varadkar is Fianna Fáil themselves. As the dominant party of government and the authors of the Constitution, the blame for the institutional discrimination against LGBT people could be placed on them. Even during the recent same-sex marriage referendum they agonised over it for a while and were only lukewarmly supportive. Meanwhile, they were in power for the boom years. Seeing an opportunity to maintain control, they went bonkers. Spent huge sums of money, much of it wasted through corruption and mismanagement. Economically, they were a conservative's nightmare. Varadkar would've grown up during this. When the country went broke, they were facing a massacre by their working class base already. So there was only so much cutting of public services they could do. Their response? Ratchet up taxes on middle to high income workers. Which included people like Varadkar. This created a huge amount of resentment amongst those voters, who also happen to be the core support of Fine Gael.
The third thing that caused Varadkar was the last government. In what would prove to be effective suicide, the centre-left Labour Party went in with Fine Gael. Whilst this gave the government a huge majority, it tied Enda Kenny's hands. Kenny is basically an old-school Irish politician in every sense of the word. Nevertheless, he ended up having to introduce liberal legislation like same-sex marriage whilst simultaneously blocking him from cutting taxes. Therefore, the party moved to the left socially whilst a huge amount of resentment continued to build up amongst the core vote regarding economic policies. Varadkar, a rising star in the party, got a great brief in Transport, Tourism and Sport. Easy to do well in with any degree of competence. But since Kenny doesn't like Varadkar (he supported a coup against him seven years ago), he reshuffled put him in Health, the poisoned chalice of Irish politics and aptly nicknamed Angola by the previous Prime Minister, due to there being land mines everywhere. But the previous Minister, Reilly, was a disaster and has been dubbed the worst Minister for Health in history. So it was easy to look good in comparison. Varadkar also trained as a nurse, so he has a relatively good grasp of the department. The result? Varadkar came out looking like a competent Taoiseach in waiting at age 38.