“We did it,” Boris Johnson, Britain’s new prime minister, announced to an enthusiastic crowd of supporters on December 13, 2019. “We did it.”
Johnson was referring to the Conservative Party’s landslide election victory, which gave it an 80-seat majority in Parliament. But it seemed at the time that the Conservatives might also have pulled off a more complicated maneuver, one that many other mainstream right-wing parties had struggled to achieve: consolidating a broad-based Conservative majority despite an insurgent far-right.
The unity of the Conservatives, often known as Tories, had been threatened for years by an anti-EU and anti-immigration movement that prioritized social concerns over economic ones. The British vote for Brexit in 2016 was in many ways a triumph of the far right over the center and led to the resignation of David Cameron, a more centrist Conservative prime minister.
But on that December day, it seemed that the Conservatives under Johnson, a Brexiteer who promised to crack down on immigration while also pledging to boost public services, had managed to fend off the threat.
Less than five years later, things look very different. Last week’s local elections in England suggested the 2019 coalition had shattered, and many analysts believe the Conservatives could be heading for defeat in the general election due in the autumn. What happened?
The answer offers lessons not only about British politics, but also about the dynamics that have propelled the far right in the United States and elsewhere.
How “sticky” are your voters?
One of the reasons Johnson won was his uniqueness as a candidate, whose charismatic, outsider personality appealed to an unusually wide swath of the population. He made “getting Brexit done” the central theme of his 2019 campaign and managed to win 74 percent of voters who had voted to leave the EU. In doing so, he not only regained the support of anti-European and anti-immigration voters, but also alienated socially conservative voters from the Labor Party, Britain’s main left-wing party, in part by adopting a more progressive economic stance.
But there’s another important factor, experts say, something they call “identity polarization.” This is the strength that has helped Donald Trump retain strong support among voters despite the violent January 6 uprising, multiple criminal cases, and years of norm-breaking rhetoric and actions.
In the United States, identities have become increasingly “stacked,” with race, religion, geographic location, and education aligning with partisan identity. With so much at stake, voters on one side easily come to see the other as their enemy. As a result, partisan affiliations are very difficult: American voters rarely switch sides. Elections tend to be decided by a small number of undecided voters and by turnout levels.
British voters are different. “When I compare the UK and the US, the biggest difference within the electorates is that there is much less pent-up identity in the UK,” said Luke Tryl, UK director of More in Common, a non-profit organisation. that tracks social and political trends. divisions in both countries. “From what the average Briton thinks about immigration, it’s not always possible to understand what they’re going to say, I don’t know, about kneeling,” he said, referring to the anti-racist gesture adopted by many athletes, or about other controversial issues such as the rights of transgender people or taxes.
As a result, British political support is much more fluid. The 2019 Conservative coalition proved fragile: only 43 per cent of 2019 Conservative voters plan to vote for the party in the next general election, according to a recent YouGov poll. Things look even worse for the Conservatives among voters who had supported the “Leave” side in the EU referendum: their top choice today is Reform UK, a new far-right party co-founded by Brexiteer Nigel Farage. , and his second The election was Labor. The Conservatives came in third place with just 27 percent of pro-Brexit voter support.
Part of this arises from widespread discontent with the state of life in Britain. Families have been hit hard by inflation and the rising cost of living. The health and education systems, along with other social services, are crumbling after years of austerity policies by conservative governments. For most voters, multiple polls show, those issues are more important than immigration or social change.
But the breadth of the 2019 Conservative electoral coalition may have obscured how weak many new voters’ support for the party was, said Jane Green, a professor at the University of Oxford and one of the lead researchers of the British Election Study, a long-running survey. duration. of voters’ beliefs and behavior.
Undecided voters who once lent their support to the “Brexit party” under Boris Johnson were always likely to be the first to switch to another party if they were dissatisfied with the government’s handling of issues such as the pandemic, inflation or care. medical, he said. .
“These people are just weaker conservatives,” he said. “And a party, in normal times, is likely to lose first the people who identify with it as the weakest.”
The Labor Party is deliberately courting these voters by pursuing cautious, centrist policies. That approach is frustrating his most left-wing supporters, but appears to be a pragmatic attempt to build the broadest possible coalition and win a majority.
Political systems shape political outcomes
If one lesson from Britain is that identity polarization – or its absence – is important, another is that political systems are too. Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system, in which the top vote-getter in each constituency wins office, means that small parties can act as spoilers: if the right-wing vote is split, for example , it becomes easier for the center. -He let the Labor Party win. But the system also makes it very difficult for small parties to get into Parliament.
In systems based on proportional representation, like most of those in continental Europe, it is much easier for smaller or more extreme parties to win seats. That means that traditional parties have less incentive, or even less ability, to be “grand” coalitions that represent a diverse range of groups.
The British electoral system leaves the country halfway between Europe and the United States. Like those in the United States, British elections will tend to be a contest between two major parties rather than coalitions of smaller parties. But the less “stacked” political identities of its citizens and their more flexible party affiliations mean that those large coalitions are more fragile and fluid.
The result will likely be political volatility, Tryl said. On the one hand, all parties must be responsive to the concerns of a broad section of the electorate if they want to retain power. That could help build consensus. On the other hand, he added, there is a risk that parties will struggle to maintain broad enough support long enough to pass difficult but necessary reforms. And that may be a lesson for Labour, if they become the next government.
“It could mean very short honeymoon periods,” Tryl said. “People won’t say: ‘Oh, I voted for Labour, I’m going to stick with them, I’ll give them time.’”
“Even if Labor ends up with a fairly large majority,” he continued, referring to the general election due in January next year, “they might still find it quite difficult to manage, because the electorate is restless.”