Now that the elections in the United Kingdom and France are over, what were the results and what do they mean for the U.S. and our elections.
Starting with the U.K., there were three basic story lines. First, across all three parts of Britain, the Conservatives had a significant decline (around 20% of the vote). Most of this vote went to the far-right Reform Party which gained 12%. The remaining 8% probably went to Labour and the Liberal Democrats but, for the most part, these two parties shed some of their vote to the Greens and independents with Labour netting a gain of around 1.6% of the vote and the Liberal Democrats netting a gain of around 0.7%. Because the U.K. uses a first past-the-post system, Labour won a lot of seats in which they had been the number two party and the Liberal Democrats won a lot of seats in which they had been the number two party. Taking 12% of the vote away from the Conservatives only translated into a handful of seats for Reform. But the Conservatives slightly outperformed their last poll numbers and, unlike what the polls suggested, Labour did not pick up a lot of votes over their 2019 performance. And the effect of that was that Conservatives avoided the complete disaster that some of the poll numbers suggested might happened and merely had an almost complete disaster (fewest seats ever).
Second, the politics of Scotland are and were different than the politics of England and Wales. In Scotland, there is an overwhelming left of center majority. For the past three U.K. elections, most supporters of Scottish independence (around 45% of the total vote) supported the Scottish Nationalist Party. But the SNP, which is the largest party in the Scottish Parliament, has recently had problems. As such, there was a massive shift in votes from the SNP to Labour. Just as the Conservatives were typically one of the top two parties in most seats in England and Wales, the SNP was typically one of the top two parties in Scotland. Just like in the rest of the U.K,, Labour picked up a lot of seats in Scotland in which they were the number two party and the Liberal Democrats picked up some seats in which they had been the number. For the Conservatives, the mutual collapse of both the SNP and Conservatives meant that the Conservatives kept most of their seats in Scotland (only losing one to the SNP) as neither Labour nor the Liberal Democrats were close enough in those seats to pick up the scraps.
Third, Labour had a slight, but significant, Gaza problem. Across the U.K. as a whole, independents and parties that emphasized Gaza picked up less than three percent of the vote. But in some districts, the vote motivated by Gaza was significant. Of the seven seats that Labour lost on the night, four were one by independents who emphasized Gaza and a fifth (the only seat that the Conservatives gained) was in the same municipality as one of those four seats and independents got 15% of the vote in that seat.
And the results in the U.K. reflect a key difference between the U.K. and the United States. In the United States, it is easy for extremists to gain control of a political party and hard for independents and minor parties to get on the ballot. In the U.K., it is hard to gain control of an established party and easy to get on the ballot. Thus, in the U.S., the far right has fought (and mostly succeeded) in taking control of the Republican Party, but the right has stayed unified. In the U.K., having been unable to take control of the Conservative Party, the far right has had to form its own party and the resulting split on the right has allowed progressive candidates to win seats with pluralities. (Of course, the left in the U.K. has always been split which has frequently allowed the right to govern with only 40% of the vote).
Turning to France, the two-stage election creates an interesting dynamic. A large number of seats saw three candidates qualify for the second round. But it’s possible to qualify without being viable. If the turnout in the first round is large enough, you can make the second round with 23% of the vote (or less). But if the lead candidate has 36% of the vote and the second -placed candidate has 30% of the vote in the first round, the votes that went to the remaining candidates are not enough to give the third-placed candidate a shot at winning. And thus, the third-placed candidate has to decide whether to stay on the ballot (making it harder for the second-placed candidate to win) or drop out. Out of the 577 seats, three hundred eleven had three or more candidates qualify for the second round. After withdrawals, that number dropped to ninety-one seats with more than two candidates. When you include the seventy-six seats in which one candidate won the seat in the first round, that left four hundred ten seats that only had two candidates in the runoff. Of the 220 seats in which candidates withdrew, approximately 180 featured a candidate of the center or left withdrawing to clear the way for a candidate of the left or center to be in a one-on-one race with a candidate of the far right. Given how well the far right did in the first round, the clear purpose behind the overwhelming majority of the withdrawal was to prevent the National Rally from being the largest party in the new Parliament.
And the results demonstrate that this approach generally worked. While exact numbers are not perfectly clear as the affiliation of some candidates was murky, the far tight did a poor job of converting votes into seats. Out of the 76 seats that had a first round winner, the National Front took 37 seats. But of the 501 seats that went to a second round, the National Front only took 88 seats. Even if you add in the seats won by affiliated parties, the group led by the National Front finished in third in the number of seats (despite getting the most votes) with 142 seats. Ensemble, (the centrist group associated with President Macron) actually won the most seats in the second round (157 seats) but they had only won two seats in the first round and their total of 159 seats was only good enough for second. The group in first place was the New Popular Front (the leftist group) which had finished just behind the National Front in the first round with 32 seats and was able to add 148 seats in the second round for a total of 180 seats.
As should be clear, no group won a majority which will result in an interesting couple of months as the parties try to figure things out. While these groups ran together in the election, their component parties may be tempted to strike their own deals. And given how these groups ran, it is not 100% clear how many seats each party got in the election. Some of the parties in the center are talking about a grand coalition which would include most, but not all of the parties on the left, center, and center-right. Some of the parties on the left are willing to talk about coalitions with the parties in the center as long as the prime minister comes from one of the parties on the left.
Putting aside the maneuverings to come (which could include new elections in 2025), there are two big stories from France. First, the second round worked the way that top two primaries are supposed to work with voters having a choice between an extremist candidate and a centrist candidate generally choosing the centrist candidate. Second, there has certainly been a collapse of the traditional parties of the center-right, center, and center-left. Politics are very personality driven with new parties (or parties that used to be on the fringe) taking a large number of seats. Whether these parties will survive when their current leaders step down remains to be seen. Because, in France, the collapse of the traditional right was complete (leaving one strong party on the right), you had less of a lopsided result. (With an additional factor being two equally strong parties of the center and left rather than one strong party on the left.) We have seen this reflected in U.S. politics where it appears that the Republican Platform for this election can best be summarized as “We didn’t mean what we have been running on for the past 40 years.”
The bottom line is that we will see some shift of policies in the U.K., but most of those shifts will be in domestic policies that will not directly implicate us. Similarly, gridlock in parliament seems likely for France, but that will only impact domestic issues, and the lack of a strong governing coalition may actually result in the French president having more freedom in foreign affairs. And in terms of what this means for domestic politics, it is clear that the far right is making a resurgence globally after a fifty-year period in which voters in democracy found the rhetoric of the far right completely unacceptable. On the other hand, the far right does not represent the majority of the vote in any country. The success of the far right has depended on knocking out the traditional right and splits on the left.
