As polls had already predicted, the Tories, the United Kingdom’s conservative party, lost the general elections in the United Kingdom, held on Thursday (4), and left Downing Street, the residence of the British Prime Minister, after 14 years.
The party won just 121 seats in the House of Commons, 244 fewer than in the previous UK election in 2019, and saw its Labour rivals, led by Keir Starmer, reach 411, well above the 326 needed to have a majority.
With a more centrist stance compared to previous Labour leaders, the new British prime minister also benefited from a smaller-than-expected rise in the right-wing nationalist Reform UK party.
Polls in June had indicated that the party, led by Nigel Farage (who finally won a seat in the House of Commons after seven failed attempts), could even obtain more seats than the Conservatives, but it only won five.
Perhaps the main reason for the Tories’ melancholic defeat was the economy. Rishi Sunak, who had taken over as prime minister in 2022 after the resignations of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, came into the election cornered by the technical recession in the second half of 2023, although the British economy showed a slight improvement in the first quarter of this year.
Inflation, although it fell to 2% year-on-year in May this year, had exceeded 10% in the second half of 2022, creating resentment among the British electorate that was reflected at the polls.
An internal party crisis has also hampered the Tories. Two years ago, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned over the Partygate scandal: members of the British government, including the prime minister, held parties during the Covid-19 pandemic while the country was under lockdown.
From Johnson’s departure to Sunak’s inauguration, the party suffered the embarrassment of having three prime ministers in less than two months – Liz Truss, elected in the Conservatives’ internal vote, resigned after the negative reaction to her economic plan.
A barometer of British voters’ dissatisfaction is that Truss lost her seat in Parliament in Thursday’s election.
Former UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps also lost his seat, summing up the chaos within the party in his speech conceding defeat.
“We have tested the patience of traditional conservative voters with a penchant for creating an endless political soap opera out of internal rivalries and divisions that have become increasingly indulgent and entrenched,” he said.
The consolation for the Conservatives is that while Starmer is riding high on the euphoria of Thursday’s landslide victory, he faces a huge challenge ahead and his triumph is far from representing a lasting political trend in the UK.
Ben Wellings, associate professor of politics and international relations at Australia’s Monash University, wrote in an article for The Conversation website that Labor’s victory “may be a castle made of sand, albeit protected by the size of its majority”.
“The electorate is still volatile, as it was in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2019. This raises the question of whether this victory is a sea change in British politics in Labour’s favour – and in contrast to the direction of politics in Europe – or another example of electoral volatility,” Wellings said.
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