by Nicol Degli Innocenti
The Prime Minister’s party is projected to be the net favorite for the next prime ministerial post with 26% of the vote against 35% of Starmer’s Labour
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The previous day’s forecasts were fully met: British voters left the governing party and cast a clear protest vote against the Tories, who have been in power for 13 years.
The results of Thursday’s local elections left no room for interpretation: the Conservative Party lost voter confidence and lost nearly a thousand seats in local government.
The Tories were also forced to cede control of areas that had always been ‘blue’, many of which went to the Liberal Democrats, while Labor recaptured once ‘red’ communities that the Conservatives were able to win in the wake of Brexit’s last ballot.
This is a worse-than-expected result for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who has been in power for several months and hoped to rally support and prove more popular than his two predecessors, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, both of whom were forced to resign. Sunak’s hopes of continuing after the scandals and internal disputes of the past year and thus being able to strengthen his position within the party have been dashed.
The prime minister had presented himself as a man of change, a dependable and responsible person, but remains, for many voters, closely associated with the Johnson era, when he was Treasury Chancellor and partly blamed the current economic crisis, with double-digit inflation and the collapse of public services.
Sunak yesterday, in British understatement, described the results as “disappointing” but said his government wants to stay the course and deliver on promises made to voters to halve inflation, contain the public health crisis, revive growth and end illegal immigration to reduce.
It’s only a local election in England, as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland didn’t vote, but the results nonetheless give a clear indication of voter trends ahead of the general election, which is 18 months from now. According to expert estimates based on Thursday’s vote, the opposition Labor Party is on course for victory and leader Keir Starmer will become Britain’s next prime minister, but it is uncertain whether Labor can win an outright majority of seats in Westminster’s parliament.
In fact, as is often the case in local elections, the small parties have garnered a lot of support, particularly the Liberal Democrats, seen as an alternative to the Tories, and the Greens, voted mostly by young people. About half of the seats lost by the Conservatives went to Labor and the other half to other smaller parties.
However, Starmer reacted enthusiastically to the results. “There’s no way we can go wrong, we have a Labor majority in sight in the next election,” said the opposition leader from Medway, one of the councils “snatched” from the Conservatives. “We’re getting fantastic results across England,” he said.
Labor is expected to hold 35% of the vote and the Conservatives 26%, the highest standings for the party in local elections since Tony Blair in 1997.
The election campaign for the de facto decisive parliamentary elections started yesterday. Labor will sharpen its weapons and campaign with renewed determination to return to power. Conservatives will lick their wounds and hope the economy helps them: if inflation falls into single digits, as the Bank of England has forecast, and the grip on the cost of living eases, they could win back the support of the moderate.
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