United States: who is Nikki Haley, Republican presidential candidate for 2024?

Europe 1 with AFP 3:48 p.m., February 14, 2023

At the UN, she tirelessly defended America's interests.

Daughter of immigrants, known for her outspokenness, Republican Nikki Haley, 51, now hopes to govern it.

She announced her candidacy for the 2024 US presidential election on Tuesday, becoming the first notable candidate to challenge Donald Trump.

Abroad, the name of this dynamic and ambitious curator is intimately associated with that of the former president, whose spokesperson she was for two years.

Upon her arrival at the UN in January 2017, this political leader, then without international experience, clashed with her hard-hitting formulas on explosive subjects.

"You don't put lipstick on a pig," she says of the Iranian nuclear deal, which she will fight firmly, even if it means bullying some of the United States' closest European allies in the process.

Open criticism of Donald Trump

Some of her partners hail the "pragmatism" of this direct and warm woman.

But for others, she is too "ideological" and "disconnected from reality" in her approaches.

A spokesperson for Donald Trump's foreign policy for two years, Nikki Haley will take care to keep the leader at a safe distance despite everything.

As during the debates in 2018 around the appointment of conservative judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, accused of sexual assault: contrary to a large part of his camp, she calls to listen to his alleged victims.

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Since the end of Donald Trump's term, the attacks have become much more frontal, with Nikki Haley openly criticizing the president's post-election crusade over supposed fraud that has never been proven.

"It's time to appoint a Republican who can govern and win a national election," she told Fox News recently.

In her press release announcing her candidacy, she inserted this warning: against bullies, if you are tackled and kick back, "it hurts them more with high heels".

Daughter of an Indian immigrant couple 

Born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, this 50-year-old is the daughter of a couple of Indian immigrants of the Sikh religion.

She entered the political scene in 2004 when she was elected to the South Carolina legislature and gained national prominence six years later during her campaign to become governor.

After her election, she maintained her course on the right, displaying her hostility to unions and taxes, as well as to homosexual marriage, or by being reluctant to welcome Syrian refugees in her state.

On June 17, 2015, a white supremacist entered a church in Charleston and killed nine African-American worshipers in this state bordered by the Atlantic.

She then finally orders the removal of the Confederate flag, considered a symbol of racism by many.

A mother of two, Nikki Haley is married to a National Guard officer formerly deployed to Afghanistan.