Two pieces from our contributors on the latest votes in the United Kingdom and France
Sir Keir's Non-Victory
by Michele Mauri
For fourteen years, British politics has been marked by a single constant. The Conservative and Unionist Party has been in power for more than a decade, having won four elections in the process (some of which more convincingly than others) and having faced both the consequences of their own actions (in Brexit) and external challenges (such as the war in Ukraine and Covid). Tory management of these issues has been far from perfect: from calling the Brexit referendum in the first place to the mismanagement of PPE procurement contracts in a bid to hand out state resources to prominent Tory supporters, little has escaped criticism. One could say that the performance of the Tories in government has been middling at best over the last decade and a half.
Conservative David Cameron rose to power in 2010 promising to get the budget under control and revitalize the economy. When he became prime minister as part of a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, the UK had a budget deficit of approximately 10% of GDP due to the cost of facing the 2008 financial crisis (which had included the effective nationalization of a number of large banks, including RBS, the Royal Bank of Scotland); he won the 2015 election with a 5% deficit and left 10 Downing Street with a 4% deficit. In the three years after that, the UK central government deficit shrank to “under control” levels, reaching 2.1% in 2019. But these were also the years of post-Brexit economic stagnation and soon, the pandemic forced the government to resume high levels of borrowing, with the deficit reaching 15% in 2021 before falling to 4.5% in the following three years. In the years since 2010, the UK has also lagged behind the rest of the G7 in terms of economic growth and investment levels (both public and private), with the British economy not yet fully recovering from the 2008 financial crisis.
Meanwhile, austerity had taken its toll. Fiscal consolidation was arguably needed in 2010, but the lack of a long-term program to get spending under control and the absence of a clear timetable for the end of austerity have allowed it to continue for almost a decade and a half. The results have been stark, with the number of people receiving emergency aid from food banks rising from less than 50,000 in 2010 to 2.9 million in 2023 according to the Trussell Trust. Generally speaking, meanwhile, poverty levels remained stable over the last decade and a half (according to a Commons Library 2024 report), going from 31% of children, 15% of pensioners, and 22% of working-age people living in relative poverty post-housing costs in 2009-10 to 29%, 15% and 19% in 2023-24, respectively. Nevertheless, according to a House of Lords Library focus on poverty in the UK, child poverty rose from 2011 to 2023 from 3.6 million to 4.3 million.
Austerity left no part of the British State untouched and unchallenged. Since 2010, the size and budget of the British Armed Forces has significantly decreased: from 200,000 fully trained personnel in 2010 to around 150,000 in 2015-16, to 130,000 in late 2023. Defense spending also dropped significantly, from 2.5% of GDP in 2010 to 2.1% in 2015, remaining there until 2021, when it was bumped up to 2.3% of GDP. To this day, British spending on national defense has not yet clawed back to its 2010 levels – whether in absolute or relative terms: spending sat at £57bn in 2010 or 2.5% of GDP, reached £56.3bn in 2022-23 and is projected to fall to £54.2bn pounds in 2023-24. The early years of Conservative rule have been particularly bad in terms of maintaining Britain’s armed forces at the required level: in only three years (2009-10 to 2012-13), Britain’s defense spending dropped from £57bn to £46bn, stabilizing below £50bn for a decade until 2021-22. In the last decade and a half, Britain did procure new, important pieces of equipment including two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, but these have often been riddled with maintenance issues – issues that can at least partially be traced back to the lack of funding for the UK’s national defense infrastructure over the past decade and a half.
Domestically, fourteen years of austerity and political instability have hindered Britain both economically and politically, making crisis management difficult and leading to a decline in the standard of living that could have been at least partially mitigated had the cost of living crisis been met with an appropriate increase in government services. Meanwhile, on the global stage, Great Britain’s decade and a half of Conservative government led to the deterioration of Britain’s relative role in NATO as a result of defense spending cuts, the substantial reduction of a key trade partnership with the European Union, and increasing tensions with France over immigration.
Today, Britain is not as rich as it was in 2008, less secure, and more unstable – and a new government will be tasked with solving the mess the Tories made. They would do well to rejuvenate themselves in the time between today and the next election.
In the meantime, however, the Starmer cabinet has been sworn in the day immediately after the election. Starmer will command what Boris Johnson would certainly describe as a stonking majority, with 411 seats out of 450 – a majority so large, Labour is barely 60 seats shy of having twice as many MPs as all other parties put together. The last time Labour got this many seats was in Tony Blair’s landslide election win in 1997, when the traditional left-of-center force in British politics won 418 seats. What differentiates these two election victories, however – other than the gulf in charisma between Starmer and Blair and the small difference in seats won – is that New Labour’s 1997 landslide came with the support of 43.2% of the UK’s voting public, whereas Labour’s 2024 victory came with barely 33% of votes.
In essence, Starmer’s majority has two sides: in Parliament, it is an undeniable and inescapable reality; in the world outside of Westminster, however, it is far from being a majority. This is often the case in British politics, where the First-past-the-post system allows parties to win sizeable majorities of seats without a majority of votes – but this year’s election will go down in history as one of the most unrepresentative in UK history, not only because of Labour getting 63% of seats despite just winning 33% of votes, but also because 14% of the British public opted to vote for Reform UK – and, despite this amounting, theoretically, to some 70-80 MPs, Reform only elected 5.
The UK’s election yielded interesting results. Starmer has a strong majority, but his own party is internally divided and filled by more than 100 new MPs eager to leave their mark and possibly willing, if needed, to defy the leadership – meanwhile, the PM is historically unpopular among the public for an opposition leader (only 39% saying he was doing a good job as such in mid June 2024), as well as within his own party due to a track record of backtracking on pledges and purging perceived rivals. Because of this, managing internal Labour politics will potentially be even more difficult than managing the country.
In what is both a blessing and a curse, Starmer is faced with a fraught political landscape. The Liberal Democrats, while they managed to get back in Parliament with a sizable contingent of MPs for the first time since their 2015 wipe-out, are still stable at 10% of the vote. The SNP was wiped out from Scotland, dropping from 1.3 million votes in 2019 to barely 700,000 in 2024, and from 48 seats to just 9. On the right, the vote was split evenly between the Conservatives, at 24%, and Reform, at 15%, meaning both parties will now be trying to wrestle control of the right from one another. This division creates the opportunity for Starmer and Labour to effectively rule completely unchallenged for at least the next five years, but it also means that any failure of this government to deliver on its election promises will be squarely on them.
Despite campaigning on “Change,” Labour’s pledges were very cautious – ever the centrist, Starmer has pursued a strategy of aligning more closely to the center of British politics, and completely reneging on Corbyn’s 2017 pledges and especially his 2019 manifesto. As a result, aside from raising taxes on high earners, scrapping the Rwanda policy and creating a publicly-owned energy company focused on green, renewables and nuclear (very cleverly branded Great British Energy or GB Energy), Labour’s pledges can almost be described as…conservative. Labour has pledged to boost police numbers by at least 13,000, to create a Border Security Command within the UK Armed Forces command structure, capping corporation tax at its current level of 25%, effectively put in place the same triple lock plus on pensions as the Tories have promised, and more.
To top off Labour’s newly-found conservative bend, Starmer, in his first address to the public as PM-elect, wasted no time to get the point across that change would be gradual, not radical, and that Labour would maintain Britain on the path of fiscal prudence – effectively accepting the Conservatives’ austerity booklet, but painting it red instead of blue.
Labour will have five years to govern. The Tories will have five years to overcome their crisis. Neither party is particularly popular today, so change may well be on the horizon for Britain. In which direction, no one yet knows.
France Back from the Brink?
by Morgane Bouguessa
The French political landscape has changed drastically in less than a decade. Since the 1980s, the system of political forces has been organized around the left-right cleavage. Following the presidency of François Hollande, French politics has centralized around three poles: extreme left, extreme right and Emmanuel Macron’s party Renaissance, centrist or considered by some to be rather center-right. The rise of the extremes, and particularly the far right, could be explained by the many crises the French have faced since 2008. From the economic crisis of 2008, which caused a sharp rise in property prices, to the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which reinforced existing inequalities and reduced the purchasing power of many French people, the far right has taken advantage of these numerous crises to accentuate its populist discourse.
On June 9, under Article 12 of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, President Emmanuel Macron decided to dissolve the National Assembly for the first time in 27 years, following his defeat in the European elections. In those elections, the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) emerged first, obtaining an unprecedented 31.37% of the vote. The rise of the RN has been marked by significant changes in its strategy: a process of "de-demonisation" and rebranding. Originally known as the Front National (FN), the party was founded in 1972 and struggled to get substantial support, with only 0.52% of the vote in its early years. However, under the leadership of Jean-Marie Le Pen the party started its shift by switching from focusing on racial and ethnic issues to presenting immigration as a social and economic issue, emphasizing its social costs. Later, Marine Le Pen pursued and intensified this de-demonisation, rebranding the party.
Firstly, the FN renamed itself RN which allowed the party to expand its votes to a larger part of voters. More than a real change in the party, it was essentially a symbolic move to further distance itself from its extremist past and appeal to a broader and more moderate electorate. The aim was to make the RN look like a credible party with a legitimate claim to power, like any other party, by making the French people forget its history. For instance, this included taking part in protests “for the Republic and against anti-semitism,” an ideology that is at the exact opposite of the party’s historical ideology, whose very first board included supporters of the Vichy regime and veterans of the Waffen SS. Marine Le Pen has “transformed” a small protest party into a major popular government movement.
All these factors have led to an increase in the proportion of French people voting for the RN over the years, explaining the reach of such a high score in the European elections.
Following the European election’s results and the dissolution of the National Assembly, the four main left-wing parties (the Socialists, the far-left LFI, the Ecologists and the Communists) formed a coalition, the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), to prevent the RN from coming to power during the legislative elections. The purpose of the legislative elections is for each constituency (577 in total) to elect one deputy, and based on their political affiliation, determine which political party has the majority of the seats in the National Assembly.
In the first round of the elections, the RN appeared to come out first, with 9.37 million votes and a high probability of having a majority, either relative or absolute. An absolute majority, set at 289 seats out of 577, would have ensured a prime ministerial position for Jordan Bardella, young, new face of the RN. In order to avoid this majority and a far-right government, the NFP and Macron’s coalition, Ensemble, withdrew 210 of their third-place candidates to consolidate the vote, while encouraging their electors to choose any candidate against the RN. This strategy allowed them to concentrate their votes in order to block the extreme right. Consequently, although the RN still obtained the highest number of votes (8.7 million), the party ended up third in the second round, securing only 143 seats, behind the NFP with 182 seats and Ensemble with 163 seats.
With no party having won an absolute majority, French politics will be dominated by three blocs: the RN, the NFP and Ensemble. According to the French Constitution, in the absence of an absolute majority, the president has the power to choose the prime minister unconditionally. However, in practice, the prime minister must have the support of Parliament to avoid a motion of censure, which the National Assembly could pass to bring down the government. President Macron needs to appoint a new prime minister quickly, as the inaugural session of the new National Assembly will take place on July 18, and a motion of censure could be proposed, potentially toppling the current government. Despite this, President Macron refused to accept the resignation of Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, asking him to stay in his position to ensure the stability of the country.
The election results and the dissolution of the National Assembly highlight a period of major political change in France. A number of different scenarios could then take place, all of which would radically alter the French government. First of all, the government chosen must reflect the majority elected. Several hypothetical coalitions have been proposed in recent days, and discussions are still ongoing. For now, the NFP has the highest number of seats in the assembly, and the government should theoretically govern alongside the left-coalition. However, the government is firmly opposed to the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI, an important member of the NFP with the most seats in its coalition) and has already refused to govern with the party.
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