Defeat pushes Conservative Party towards more radical populism

Before looking back to the centre, a defeated political party always looks to the extremes to find the cause of its downfall. The Conservative Party of the United Kingdom is not going to be an exception. The populist, Eurosceptic and xenophobic drift that was inaugurated by the Brexit referendum has not stopped in recent years. It reached its ephemeral splendour with Boris Johnson, became a caricature during the brief mandate of Liz Truss and has persisted, in a somewhat artificial and artificial way, with Rishi Sunak, a young technocrat, liberal and cosmopolitan who insisted on deporting immigrants to Rwanda and questioning international law in a desperate attempt to flatter the ears of the conservative base.

Everything suggests that the battle for the leadership of the new opposition party will contain an increased dose of these ingredients. “The chances of any candidate who does not double down on Euroscepticism, climate denialism, a national populist vision of reality, and the call for an ever smaller public administration are increasingly remote,” said Tim Bale, professor of political science at Queen Mary University of London and author of The New York Times. The Conservative Party After Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation (The Conservative Party After Brexit: Storm and Transformation).

An example of the way in which the Tories have headed A campaign that was doomed to failure from the start was the fact that they spent more time discussing the future than the present. More speculation about future contenders for the party leadership, once in opposition, than efforts to turn around the polls.

Women of the hard right

Among the candidates to take the helm of the Titanic Three women stand out in the Conservative Party’s internal debates over the last few years. Firstly, the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who has become the unofficial spokesperson for the most radical and reactionary Conservatism. Since her forced resignation from the portfolio in November 2023, she has been the fiercest critic of Sunak’s immigration policy. “Someone has to tell the truth. Your plan is not working, we are reaping more and more electoral defeats and we are running out of time,” she reproached the still prime minister in her farewell letter.

Braverman receives applause from the hardline wing of the party, but provokes immense rejection among the liberals and moderates who still remain – increasingly fewer – in the ranks. tories.

More attractive is the option of Kemi Badenoch, the daughter of Nigerians from the Yoruba people. At 44, she has demonstrated undeniable leadership skills and an articulate and firm voice on major issues, but also a loyalty to the party that is bombproof. She was the first to hit populist Nigel Farage hard when he decided to stand for election and once again became the main existential threat to the party.

And alongside her is Penny Mordaunt, who maintains a notable popularity among the rank and file, due to her image as a woman with common sense and a traditional conservative, although having lost her seat she is practically out of the battle.

There are many more floating around in the polls. Most of them leaning more towards populism than moderation. No one rules out the reappearance of Boris Johnson, or even Farage himself, if the increasingly intense lament of many comes to fruition. Tories for the lost unity of the right, and decides to return to the training he once abandoned.

There are also candidates who preserve the spirit of the so-called one nation tories (one nation conservatives), the successful invention of former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, which made the Conservative Party the natural refuge for most Britons. The possibility of bringing back David Cameron and men like Tom Tugendhat, the great hope of the centrists, or James Cleverly, until now Home Secretary, is being raised.

“During the Brexit years, between 2016 and 2019, the party abandoned any respect for institutions and any attempt to understand the complexity of things. Its traditional preference for gradualism in politics and its caution in the face of risk,” he wrote in the weekly The New Statesman David Gauke, the former Conservative minister who left the party fed up with Eurosceptic radicalism. “In return, they fell for grandiloquent, reckless and unrealistic promises. The Conservative Party was no longer comfortable within its image of a serious governing party,” he complained.

The return to the opposition will be for the Tories that they remain standing – many have lost their seats, and therefore their chances of being influential – a bath in that reality that they decided to abandon.

Just a year ago, Gauke gathered at the offices of a public relations firm in the city Londoner barely twenty deputies, and many more members of the press, at the presentation of the book The Case For Centre Right (the Defense of the Center Right). Eleven notable members of the party, all of them now removed from the daily life of the formation, participated in a work that vindicated the traditional moderation of the conservatives. Michael Heseltine, the most brilliant politician of the Margaret Thatcher era – his candidacy in the primaries against the Iron Lady ended up causing the resignation of the legendary prime minister – forcefully explained to EL PAÍS the causes of the populism that arose among the Conservatives. Tories“Racism and immigration. Not just here, but all over the world. Tribalism, racism, immigration. And all fueled by that deep human instinct to protect what you have,” he summed up.

The Conservatives, who have just lost almost everything, are faced with the dilemma of recovering the unifying spirit of Disraeli, which for years made them a perfect machine for winning elections, or finally surrendering to the spirit of Farage and becoming something different from what they have been for centuries.

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