A dramatic victory in a special parliamentary election. Hundreds of seats have won in English municipalities. A first taste for power in the lower government levels.
By making extensive gains in A set of local elections Hold Thursday in England, Nigel Farage, one of the best known in Britain Supporters of President Trump And the leader of the British anti-immigration reform has consolidated his reputation of the country’s more political disruptive.
But he may still have done something bigger: exploded a hole in the country’s bipartite political system.
For almost all the last century, power in Great Britain alternated between the Labor Party Government, now led by the Prime Minister Keir Starmerand the opposition conservatives, who selected a new leader last year, Kemi Badenoch.
Again with Reformation growing support And gains for other small parts, this duopoly rarely looks more trembling.
“The two main parties were made of a potential expulsion of their 100 -year -old mandates of Downing Street,” said Robert Ford, professor of political science at Manchester University.
Still in shock after being ejected from power last year, the Conservatives underwent another set of disastrous results. With the flat economy, the work was punished by the angry voters against the borders of public spending and the higher taxes introduced since his coming to power.
The electorate rejected the two main parties, said Professor Ford, adding that a result like this occurs during a general election: “The Conservative Party would cease to exist as a significant force in Parliament.”
Claire Ainsley, former political director of Mr. Starmer, said that the results also reflected longer -term trends, including a rupture of the traditional loyalty of classes among voters, the growing attraction of nationalist policy and increasing support for centrist liberals, the Greens and independent candidates.
“We have seen the fragmentation of society and which has traveled our policy,” said Ms. Ainsley, who is now working in Great Britain for the progressive Policy Institute, a research institute based in Washington. “There is now the multiparty vote.”
The result is that the two main parties are in difficulty while they are in competition not only with each other, but also with the opponents on their left and their right.
This mood of public disenchantment gave an opening to the small parties, including the Liberal Democrats, who won 163 seats of the Council, and the Greens, who won 44. But the greatest beneficiary was the reform, whose supporters were Energy by the vigorous campaign of M. Farage.
In an interview during a gathering of reform in the United Kingdom in March, John McDermottroe, a party supporter, said that many people in his region of Stockton-On-Ees, in northeast of England, said that the Labor Party had “far from workers”.
As for Mr. Farage, “he is very charismatic, he communicates with people from all sectors of life, he says that as is,” said McDermottroe.
The fragmentation that Mr. Farage sparked on British policy was felt even in the reform of the lost races, in particular the town hall of a region known as western England.
Helen Godwin of Labor won with a quarter of the votePutting it only slightly before the reform of the United Kingdom, while even the fifth party won 14% of the votes.
Less than a third of eligible voters have voted, the type of low participation rate which is common in local elections. But that meant that Ms. Godwin was elected by only 7.5% of eligible voters, Gavin Barwell, former Downing Street chief of staff and member of the conservative opposition party, noted on social networksAdding that there was a “collapse” of the bipartite political system.
This can still be an exaggeration.
Due to a reorganization, the number of seats disputed in the local elections on Thursday has been the smallest since 1975, and the participation rate is still low in such breeds.
The next general elections of Great Britain – when this proposal is tested properly – should not be held before 2029, and the challenges prior to bipartite domination have faded.
In the early 1980s, the social democratic party, founded by moderates disenchanted from the Labor Party, promised to “break the mold” of British politics. In alliance with another centrist party, he briefly exceeded 50% An opinion poll. It turned out to be a false dawn.
However, with five parties in the running for votes in a system that suited two, British politics has become deeply unpredictable.
Born of the union movement, work was once considered as the working class party, with its heart in the industrial northern and the middle of the nation. Traditionally, the conservatives represented the rich and medium -sized classes, with supported support mainly in the South.
The relaxation of these links had already weakened the grip of the two main parts. In the general elections of last year, the combined vote for work and the conservatives fell below 60% for the first time Since before 1922And Labor landslide victory was made on approximately 34% of the votes. In Scotland, the Pro-independence National Party has reshaped politics.
Mr. Starmer is now faced with an enigma: if the work collaborates the right to appease the sympathizers of Mr. Farage, this is likely to lose his support for his progressive base for liberal democrats or the Greens.
Ainsley said that the Labor Party was confronted with “a huge challenge” in the context of tight pressure on public spending, but added that it must focus on the delivery of voters who always suffer from the cost of living.
The conservatives face an even greater threat to the reform, as well as their own challenge. The conservatives must take over the voters who have moved to Mr. Farage without traveling so far to the right that they lead more liberal conservatives to centrist liberal democrats.
Pollitologists also say that a change is in progress which could transform the fortune of the reform, taking what was a party of protest and transforming it into a force which could allow its ambition to replace the conservatives as the main opposition party.
The British legislative elections operate under a system known as “the first past the post”, in which the candidate who wins the most votes in each of the 650 constituencies is elected. So far, this has generally disadvantaged the small parts.
“When it was only the Libs Dems who tried to break the duopoly of the workforce, a basic rule was that they, and their predecessors, needed at least 30% to overcome the prejudices inherent in the first past,” wrote Peter Kellner, an expert in survey.
With more parts in the running and no dominant force, the calculations change. “The tilting point for a party such as the reform is no longer 30%. It’s probably about 25%. This is where they are in the polls,” he added.
Professor Ford said he had agreed that something fundamental moved and that the reform “was now doing well enough for the first post to be their enemy and become their friend”.
After the last elections, said Professor Ford, it is “much easier for Nigel Farage to say” We are the real opposition party “, and it is more difficult for people to laugh when he says.”