Nigel Farage has been shortlisted for TIME magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ award.
The former UK Independence Party leader is one of eleven contenders for the accolade, along with President-Elect Donald Trump and his electoral opponent Hillary Clinton, in a shortlist drawn up by the magazine’s editors.
The award is handed to the person deemed to have most influenced the news during the year, for better or for worse. Farage has been nominated for his role in bringing about Brexit.
“As head of the U.K. Independence Party, Farage was a face of the successful campaign for Britain to leave the European Union, positioning the referendum as the start of a global populist wave against the political establishment,” TIME noted in its publicity.
Also featured on the list are Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, and the CRISPR Scientists who have developed a ground-breaking technique to edit DNA which TIME said “has the potential to transform science and the human experience, as it could be used to find and remove mutations responsible for incurable diseases”.
The results will be announced on Wednesday.
Mr. Farage has said that 2016 will be remembered as the year the “little people decided they would assert themselves and could actually beat the establishment”, the Evening Standard has reported.
Visiting Sleaford for Thursday’s by-election, in which the Conservatives are defending a majority of 24,000, Mr. Farage declined to predict whether the UKIP candidate Victoria Ayling was in with a chance of winning.
“I don’t know, it’s 2016, why predict anything?” he asked.
“Only an idiot predicts things in 2016 because it’s been so full of upsets.
“It’s a big opportunity for voters to say to the Prime Minister: We voted for Brexit, we didn’t vote for hard Brexit, we didn’t vote for soft Brexit, we voted for Brexit… and would you please get on with it.”
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