Could Arlene Foster be the DUP's scapegoat for Boris Johnson's Brexit 'betrayal'?
Political observers say a move to oust her with calls for a leadership contest will be "unsurvivable".
Wednesday 28 April 2021 03:57, UK
The Democratic Unionist Party has its roots in the fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster.
Its members will be familiar with the origin of the term 'scapegoat'.
In the Old Testament of the Bible, Israelites seeking atonement for their sins had to choose two goats.
One was sacrificed and the other - the 'escape goat' - was chased into the wild, taking the sins of the people with it.
Could Arlene Foster be the DUP's scapegoat for Boris Johnson's "betrayal" over Brexit?
Still dealing with the pandemic, the first minister says she has "bigger things to do" than defend her position but she has never faced a bigger challenge.
With as much as 80% of her Stormont Assembly party now in open revolt, it appears her days as DUP leader could be over.
The problems have been piling up around her not for weeks or months but for years.
Many in the party feel the top team - Arlene Foster, deputy leader Nigel Dodds and key backroom advisers - have been sending mixed messages.
Like many other parties, the DUP is comprised of two wings: one more pragmatic, the other more ideological.
For some, the last straw came last week when the party opposed a ban on so-called gay conversion therapy in Northern Ireland.
Mrs Foster abstained on the issue, leading many in the DUP to conclude that she was now too weak on contentious social issues.
They were already deeply frustrated that she had not put up more of a fight when same-sex marriage and abortion legislation were imposed on Northern Ireland by Westminster.
But the imposition of the Northern Ireland Protocol - a trade border in the Irish Sea - had set the context for an internal show-down.
Shortly before he won the Tory leadership, Boris Johnson famously told the DUP's annual conference in Belfast that no British prime minister "could or should" accept such an arrangement.
Arlene Foster has been under pressure to hit back harder for what many regard as the Prime Minister's "betrayal".
The difficulty for Mrs Foster is that she has been attempting to demolish that trade border in the Irish Sea without demolishing the power-sharing government by accident.
Under pressure from the Unionist electorate, one year from an Assembly election, Mrs Foster could be sent into the wilderness to pay the price for that.