Some initial thoughts on the UK elections.
1. It confirms once again that when a center-right party veers to the hard right to weaken the far right, it ends up doing the opposite. After purging moderates and going full-on wingnuts and fever swamp, the Tories got decimated by Reform, not Labour.
🧵
2. Labour held steady in total votes, but combined with the fractured vote on the right, won a historic parliamentary majority. This is in line with trends elsewhere in Europe. The far right rises and wins when the center-left atomizes (Italy, France) and falls short when it holds (Spain, Portugal).
3. I'd been thinking with relief that the UK was bucking the trend of a rising radicalized far right. But I think that was premature. And Labour inherits a catastrophic landscape for governance. It will take near-perfect leadership and a lot of luck to get this right. Otherwise 2029 could be scary.
4. To tie these two thoughts together, Labour won after shifting to the center. So it may have got the same number of votes as in 2019 but not necessarily from the same voters.
Starmer would do well to learn from Macron's mistakes, otherwise radicalizing extremes could render the center irrelevant.
Labour got slightly fewer votes than in 2019 (9.5 mn vs 10.2 mn), but picked up 213 seats.
Same for the LibDems (3.5 mn votes vs 3.7mn in 2019), but picked up 63 seats.
And Reform got 4mn votes, but just 4 seats.
Seems very premature to talk of a remade electoral landscape outside Scotland.
Hard to disagree with any of this. Starmer needs to deliver, quickly, to try and restore faith in politics and yet almost all issues in UK can't be improved in very short term.
Agree that 2029 could be very interesting, especially if the Conservatives and Reform morph. That said, the age demographics of both parties are not playing in their favour.
