By Rafael Behr, The Guardian.
Britain has already had its populist reckoning, in 2016. European states can take few lessons from our current calm.
Two summers ago, when the Conservatives had just defenestrated Boris Johnson and were rallying around Liz Truss as his successor, there was little prospect of Britain reaching the autumn of 2024 as a beacon of political stability. Yet here we are. Or rather, there stands Keir Starmer, in command of a vast parliamentary majority, unthreatened by a debilitated opposition, the envy of his European peers.
France elected a new national assembly three days after British voters sent Starmer to Downing Street but the result was so messy that President Macron still hasn’t managed to convene a permanent government. The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, looked drained of authority even before regional elections last weekend humiliated his Social Democratic party and its coalition partners. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) topped the ballot in one eastern state, Thuringia, and came a close second in neighbouring Saxony.
When Starmer visited both leaders last week, it was billed as diplomatic renewal to re-establish bonds that had frayed under the Tories. But the mood was coloured by misalignment of political cycles – an ascendant British prime minister crossing midair with French and German counterparts on their way down.
The unhappy trajectory of continental leaders who were once feted as champions of centre-ground moderation is narrated as a cautionary tale by Labour strategists. There is never a precise translation across different political systems, but a common theme is failure to turn back the tide of insurgent nationalism.
The recent advance of the far right has sometimes been disrupted but never reversed in France, Germany and most other European democracies. The only known method is obstruction, not persuasion. Short-lived, unstable coalitions of voters set aside other differences for the common cause of preventing extremists seizing the institutional bastions of democracy. That is not a durable formula.
The spectacle of established parties organising resistance is easily fed back into the far-right narrative loop as proof of an elite conspiracy to deny ordinary folk their rightful representation. Each time the call goes out to barricade the gates of power, the populists’ claim to have true democracy on their side gets more traction. The electoral margins get tighter until, as now in Thuringia, the self-proclaimed champions of constitutional order find themselves in the uncomfortable position of insisting that the winners of an election must not be allowed to claim their prize.
Starmer’s team are under no illusions about the potential for an equivalent dynamic to take hold in Britain if they can’t demonstrate that Labour government makes a material difference to people’s lives. The fact that Reform UK came second to Labour in 89 seats is a reminder that Nigel Farage’s brand of hard-right nationalism has put down deep roots in British electoral soil.
July’s landslide victory spread a wide but shallow red gloss over large parts of the electoral map where allegiances are variegated and volatile. The Commons majority was fattened by anti-Tory tactical voting and an electoral system that punishes small parties.
A model by the Electoral Reform Society feeding the election result through the proportional system used for Scottish parliamentary and Welsh Senedd ballots awards Reform 94 seats instead of its actual tally of five. The Greens get 42, not four. Labour, with a total of 236, would have to govern in partnership with Liberal Democrats, maybe the Greens. In that scenario, Starmer looks more like Scholz three years ago, cobbling together a “traffic-light” coalition of red, orange and green.
The suffocation of multiparty preferences in a first-past-the-post ballot is a big part of the reason why British politics happens to look settled by European standards. But not the only one. There is also the chastening experience of Brexit. In the years immediately after the 2016 referendum, continental leaders often cited Britain’s adventures in Euroscepticism as a parable of foolish surrender to populism. There was a measurable effect in forcing French and Italian nationalists to dial down their anti-EU rhetoric.
In the run-up to European parliamentary elections earlier this year, Gabriel Attal, the French prime minister at the time, invoked Brexit as a case study in electoral buyers’ remorse. (The message was not so salient by then. The far right came out on top, provoking Emmanuel Macron to call the snap parliamentary poll that brought France to its current political impasse.)
In Britain, enthusiasm for Brexit is a minority position but a protected one in political debate because of its concentration in those seats where Labour dreads a Faragist revanche. Yet the persistence of that taboo in Westminster doesn’t indicate universal amnesia when it comes to the cause that Farage championed and that the Tories co-opted with fanatical zeal. A quietly furious remainer sensibility was an underreported factor swinging dozens of Tory seats to the Lib Dems.
More broadly, the Conservative bid for a fifth term was crippled by the absence of legacy, and that void – the hole where achievements after 14 years in office should have been on display – was Brexit-shaped. Neither of the two co-leaders of the official Vote Leave campaign, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, was even a parliamentary candidate by the time the election came around.
Although they won’t admit it, the founding fathers of the revolution are embarrassed by their progeny. They are allowed to change the subject because the media that should probe their shame led the cheers for their folly. Farage, having never served in government, has an available get-out, accusing the Tories of betraying his original Eurosceptic vision. But he prefers to bypass the B-word altogether and simply pound his anti-immigration drum.
For Britain’s Eurosceptic ideologues and radical nationalists, the election of a Labour government brings precious respite. They are no longer expected to honour their preposterous utopian promises. They don’t have to justify the consequences of actions they demanded as matters of moral and patriotic urgency. Their big mistake was winning that referendum in the first place. Like dogs chasing a car, they didn’t expect to have to drive. Now they can go back to barking.
While Brexit was hardly mentioned in this year’s election, that very omission expressed a kind of repudiation, enough at least for Labour to claim a mandate for serious, boring government focused on competence and delivery. Whether that amounts to any kind of immunity against future iterations of populism is a different matter. The salutary lesson of the referendum, being unspoken, is all too easily forgotten.
And when other European leaders look at Britain to see the ingredients of our present political stability what do they see? An electoral system that is basically unfair but expedient for repressing insurgent parties, and a nasty hangover from a spectacular binge on bad policy. Those are not conditions that anyone would want to replicate abroad. Nor are they obviously durable at home.
