London – In British and French elections this month, voters abandoned mainstream center-right parties for the populist right, but a split in the right vote and strategic voting on the left meant they failed to translate that support into electoral victory.
Britain’s Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, won a landslide victory in the election, winning 412 seats in the 650-seat Parliament, beating the mainstream Conservative Party, which lost 244 seats and managed to retain just 121.
It was the worst performance in the Conservative Party’s nearly two-century history, after it won just five seats despite receiving more than four million votes, amid the rise of the populist Reform Party led by Nigel Farage, Britain’s “Trump.”
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Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and local candidate Mark Butcher watch the UEFA EURO 2024 match between Denmark and England at the Armfield Club in Blackpool, England on June 20, 2024. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images) (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
In France, a broad-based left-wing coalition of hard-line communists, environmentalists and socialists won 188 of the 577 seats in parliament. President of France Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition, the French Ensemble, won 161 seats, giving it a ruling majority.
Marine Le Pen’s populist National Rally party won more than 37% of the vote, making it the most popular party among French people, but only came in third in terms of seats. The mainstream center-right Republicans came in a distant fourth with 6.2% of the vote.
“This is clearly a rejection of the Conservative party, of the Conservative establishment,” Alan Mendoza, executive director of the London-based Henry Jackson Society, told Fox News Digital. “There was a very high turnout in France for France. It’s clear then that this is an anti-National Coalition election.”
Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally group in the National Assembly, joined Jordan Bardella, leader of the Rassemblement National, during the group’s final rally before the European Parliament elections on June 9. (Photo: Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images) (Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The election demonstrated voters’ continued support for political movements that embrace right-wing populism on issues related to immigration, crime and social problems, while abandoning weak traditional centre-right parties that have failed to bring about meaningful change.
However, the populist insurgency was unable to translate its widespread support at the polls into electoral victory due to strategic voting pacts and divided support among right-wing voters.
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“In both cases, the party on the left was able to maximise the vote and the party on the right was unable to maximise the vote,” Mendoza said. “People say Labour’s support is broad and shallow, but that’s what you need to win elections in the UK to have a large amount of support without being concentrated in any particular area,” he added of Labour’s overall low approval rating.
“The reality in France is that the various left-wing parties and Macron came together and basically shut out the right, but the right didn’t do the same. The Republicans stayed in the race and didn’t give way to the Rally National and vice versa.”
French President Emmanuel Macron and First Lady Brigitte Macron leave a polling station before the second round of voting in the legislative elections in Le Touquet-Paris-Plage, northern France, Sunday, July 7, 2024. (Associated Press)
Le Pen’s Rally National party came out on top in the first round of voting last month on a platform of drastically cutting immigration and crime and improving the economy.
Populist parties came close to winning a majority in the second round of voting, but their efforts were curtailed by a strategic electoral agreement between Macron’s centrist and left-wing coalition parties, who agreed to withdraw candidates to avoid splitting the anti-National Rally vote.
Farage’s Reform Party received more than four million votes nationwide, making it the third most popular party, but because of Britain’s local constituency system, which gives seats to the candidates who get the most local votes, the party won just 1 percent of parliamentary seats.
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Farmers hold flags of European countries as they gather to hear their leaders speak during a protest in Brussels, Tuesday, June 4, 2024. Farmer groups want the Green Deal climate agreement taken off the agenda. (AP Photo/Omar Habana) (AP Photo/Omar Havana)
Although the mainstream Conservative Party received more than two million more votes than the Reform Party, it remains the second largest political force in the country, and there are growing calls for reform of the electoral system to give it more representation based on total votes.
Despite winning a historic number of seats in the UK Parliament, Labour won the election with just 9.6 million votes – more than 600,000 fewer than in the 2019 general election, when Labour, led by controversial socialist Jeremy Corbyn, suffered two electoral defeats.
“The Reform vote may have been largely made up of Conservatives who left the Conservative party to join the Reform Party, but in the UK it was a much larger number of people who decided not to vote,” Mendoza said. “The Conservative vote share fell by 20 points and many Conservatives who voted Conservative in 2019 simply did not vote and were not inspired by any party.”
Labour leader Keir Starmer addresses supporters at the Tate Modern in London, Friday, July 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Khin Chun)
In the 2019 general election, the Conservative Party led by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson ran a populist campaign on the idea of ”getting Brexit done,” and won a majority of seats. The Brexit Party, the predecessor of the Reform Party, withdrew its candidates from the election in order to support the Conservative Party.
After the election, Conservative leaders claimed that the “Conservative” coalition, made up of the Reform and Conservative parties, had defeated Labour, winning a majority of more than 11 million votes, suggesting that the electorate was generally shifting to the right.
Suella Braverman, one of the Conservative leadership candidates, criticised the party’s operations in a speech at the Popular Conservative Conference and urged it to embrace populism for the party’s future.
“In my opinion, the Reform phenomenon was completely predictable and avoidable, and entirely our own fault,” she told the audience. “It’s no good to vilify supporters of Reform, it’s no good to slander the Reform Party, it’s no good to compare Reform rallies to the Nuremberg rallies. That doesn’t work. It’s a fundamental mistake to criticize people who voted for Reform.”
French President Emmanuel Macron (right) meets with Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far-right National Rally party, at the Elysee Palace in Paris on June 21, 2022. (Ludovic Marin/Pool/AP)
She also urged the Conservatives to “restore credibility to the core policies of a united Conservative party” and tackle immigration, “because we have been weak, we have been timid and we have failed to tackle this very urgent issue.”
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In France, despite failing to win legislative power, the Rally National party has maintained its populist momentum and is eyeing presidential elections in 2027, poised to pit Ms Le Pen against the country’s top job.
Meanwhile, with the left and centre parties now holding a new parliamentary majority, Macron, who is already hugely unpopular, faces the prospect of leading a politically paralysed and hanging parliament.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
