London (AFP)

The new British Finance Minister Sajid Javid, eurosceptic and son of Pakistani immigrants, gets a key position in Boris Johnson's government right in the middle of the Brexit process.

Sajid Javid, 49, who confessed last week that he had suffered racism as a child, had already been the first member of an ethnic minority to head the Ministry of the Interior under Theresa May.

The former banker succeeds Philip Hammond, a supporter of maintaining close ties with the European Union, who has resigned not to offer satisfaction to Boris Johnson, the Brexit champion, to dismiss him.

Since being elected to Parliament in 2010, he has quickly risen through the ranks of the Conservative Party, and his personal history has made him a Tory flag bearer.

His father had arrived in the country in the early 1960s without a penny in his pocket, finding work in a cotton factory in Rochdale, near Manchester (north-west England).

The family moved to Bristol, South West England, where Sajid Javid's father worked as a bus driver, before returning to a women's clothing store.

Despite the difficult end of the month, Sajid Javid entered the university and then made a career in the bank, first at Chase Manhattan Bank, then at Deutsche Bank, before turning to politics.

He offers a modern and multicultural UK face: his parents are Muslim, while his wife Laura, with whom he has four children, is a Christian and a practitioner.

- Promises of expenses -

Supporter of Thatcherism and the free market, Sajid Javid, despite his Euroscepticism, had pronounced against the Brexit in the referendum of June 2016, by economic pragmatism. But he has tackled in recent weeks and offered his support to Boris Johnson in the race at Downing Street.

One of his main challenges for Finance will be to balance his very liberal view of the economy with Boris Johnson's promise to increase public spending during his campaign, during which he also pledged to lower taxes for the richest and the poorest Britons.

"Boris Johnson seems ready to carry out a more flexible budgetary policy and he probably expects his minister to support this vision," said Howard Archer, an economist at EY.

For Neil Wilson, Markets.com economic analysis site, Sajid Javid should be very attentive to the City, the huge financial heart of the British capital, to mitigate the consequences of Brexit.

"I expect him to loosen the purse strings with a more stimulus-and-away-from-austerity approach" practiced by the Conservatives since coming to power in 2010, he writes.

As Minister of the Interior, he was criticized for refusing at the beginning of the year the return of a 19-year-old woman who joined ISIS in Syria in 2015. This decision provoked a deep debate in the country. country, revived after the announcement of the death in Syria of the baby of the young woman.

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