France and the United Kingdom both held national elections that concluded earlier this month. In Britain, 14 years of brutal and chaotic Conservative rule ended with the election of Keir Starmer's Labour. In France, the Left Alliance beat back the far-right, yet the latter gained their highest ever vote share despite failing to win as predicted.

There appears a chasm in the direction of these two countries, separated by 25 miles of sea at the narrowest point. Yet in both countries the underlying trends include racist populism and a surge in far-right momentum at the expense of incumbent neoliberal parties, even as left wing wins brought fresh calls for change.

This report follows Britain’s election from last weekend, with a fuller report on the French election due out shortly on Occupy.com.

A fractious right looking to the next election

Britain's Labour Party won a landslide victory of 412 of 650 House of Commons seats on July 4. The Conservatives dropped 251 seats to a record low of 121 seats. Yet these headline figures mask volatile currents.

Clearly, after 14 years of corruption and chaos, the Conservatives were rejected. Yet many of their votes went to a new right-wing populist Reform party. Centrists Liberal Democrats, Greens and independent candidates also gained against a backdrop where there is little excitement for a new Labour government.

Reform UK is a new anti-migrant populist right-wing party that got 4 million votes, yet only won five seats due to the country’s first-past-the-post electoral system. It managed to harness and split the right-wing vote, even coming second to Labour in some constituencies that the Conservatives had won in the previous election. Looking forward, Reform poses an existential threat to the already fractured Conservative Party.

Reform UK is the new project of Nigel Farage, a Brexit campaign figurehead, a racist and Donald Trump ally.

Farage rallies against the establishment despite his private education and previous trading job in the City of London. He is given much airtime. His previous projects – including Leave.eu – have received a great deal of corporate and international — particularly Russian – funding.

After his eighth attempt to become an MP, Farage now sits in the House of Commons, where Reform will aim to pull the Conservatives further right.

Conservative collapse after 14 cruel, chaotic and corrupt years

The Conservatives hemorrhaged votes to all other parties. The main focus for many voters was to kick out the party that had been in power since 2010. During this period, food banks became normalized even for working people; a housing crisis exploded; the National Health Service is in ruins; thousands of disabled people have died when denied benefits; and 4.3 million children are growing up in poverty.

Meanwhile, the rich became super-rich, especially during the Covid pandemic. Summarizing the key takeaways of Britain’s five Conservative prime ministers over the past 14 years explains Britain's political nightmare:

David Cameron pushed draconian spending cuts, accelerated “privatization on steroids” of public services, and an EU referendum to quell Eurosceptic voices, which severed Britain's ties to Europe and catalyzed the nation’s growing xenophobia. 

Theresa May, who served from 2016 to 2019, faced escalating Brexit chaos, and continued with the Tories’ “Hostile Environment” xenophobic policies against migrants and refugees.

Boris Johnson (2019-22) callously partied during Covid and enabled profiteering, Liz Truss (2022) crashed the economy in 49 days, and Rishi Sunak (2022-24) stabilized the economic chaos of Truss only to continue the other leaders' legacy of cuts and anti-migrant hostility.

Reform's answer to the crises facing the country is that the Conservatives did not go far enough, especially in preventing immigration. Among a divided Conservative Party, many agree – including ex-PM Truss, who lost her seat and blamed her party's defeat on not being brave enough. 

The chaos echoes what is happening in France, where neoliberal Macron pushed lighter versions of what the far-right National Rally were suggesting, creating a dynamic where many voters wanted the stronger anti-migrant and other populist policies.

A powerful, but not popular, new Labour government

Labour has inherited a country in ruin. Its mandate is shaky, with two-thirds of parliamentary seats yet only a third of the votes. Turnout in the election was the lowest in 20 years.

Labour leader Keir Starmer's popularity is not high. It is just better than the Conservatives, which was the main message in his campaign. Labour has lost swathes of party members, many purged for leftist positions after the ex-Head of Public Prosecutions took over from previous leader Jeremy Corbyn and dragged the party to the right.

The Labour leader has also suggested Israel had the right to block food and water to Gaza and collectively punish Palestinians for the actions of Hamas after the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. This led to Labour losing four constituencies to independent candidates who were running on a pro-Palestine platform.

Starmer has dropped many of the promises he made in 2020 when he became Labour leader. These include ending the two-child cap on benefits, raising taxes for higher earners, a green new deal, defending free movement across the EU, and creating “an immigration system based on compassion and dignity.”

Labour's winning manifesto promised minor improvements to NHS waiting times and a green transition, but it does not go far enough to fix the catastrophic mess left by the last 14 years.

Britain's broken political system

The other headline from last week’s General Election is how the archaic voting system means the seats in Parliament are only loosely correlated with vote share. For example, the Liberal Democrats did well and their 12 percent of votes corresponded to about the same proportion of seats in Parliament. However, smaller parties like Reform, the Greens and the Scottish National Party got far fewer seats relative to vote share.

This supposedly straightforward election story of a Labour landslide masks a complex and fractious political reality. The fault lines in the electoral system are becoming clearer. Pro-Irish unity party Sinn Féin won the most seats in Northern Ireland. Meanwhile, the Greens are gaining momentum and could offer a home to those disappointed with Starmer's possible inability to deal with the social and ecological crises facing the country. 

If the Conservative Party is not able to stop the ascendancy of those pushing for culture wars with the increased pressure from Reform, and if Starmer keeps moving to the right because he sees the vacant space in the centre-right left by traditional small-c conservatives, the UK could open up the door to an even stronger surge of right-wing populists, as has happened on the other side of the channel in France.

Read the forthcoming analysis on France’s recent election results.