After 100 Years, Britain’s Two-Party Political System May Be Crumbling

A dramatic victory in a special parliamentary choice. Hundreds of seats won in English municipalities. A first sample of power at the lower levels of the government.

When obtaining great profits in a set of local elections held in England on Thursday, Nigel Farage, one of the best known supporters of President of President Trump and the leader of the United Kingdom Party of Anti-Inmigration Reform, consolidated his reputation as Country

But it may have made something bigger even more: blowing a hole in the country’s bipartisan political system system.

During almost the entire century, the power in Britain alternated between the Government Labor Party, now led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and opposition conservatives, which last year selected a new leader, Kemi Badenoch.

However, with growing support for reform and profits for other small parties, that duopoly has rarely been more unstable.

“The two main parties have realized a possible eviction of their 100 -year ownership of Downing Street,” said Robert Ford, a professor of political science at Manchester.

Still staggering after being expelled from power last year, conservatives suffered another disastrous set of results. With the plain of the economy, voters were punished by angry voters with government spending curbs and the highest taxes introduced since he came to power.

The electorate rejected both main matches, said Professor Ford, added that it was a result like this that happened in a general election, “the conservative party would cease to exist as a significant force in Parliament.”

Claire Ainsley, former Director of Policy of Mr. Starmer, said that the results also reflect more long -term trends, including a breakdown of traditional class loyalties among voters, the growing attraction of nationalist policy and the growing support for centrist liberal democrats, the elderly and independent candidates.

“We have been seeing the fragmentation of society and that has flumed to our policy,” said Mrs. Ainsley, who now works in Great Britain for the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington headquarters with headquarters in Washington. “Now there is a multiparty vote.”

The result is that both main parties are fighting while they are competing not only with each other, but also with opponents of their political and right policy.

That state of mood of public disenchantment gave an opening to the narrowest parties, including the liberal democrats, who won 163 seats of the Council, and the Greens, who won 44. But the biggest beneficiary was the reform, whose supporters have energized for the vigorous campaigns of Mr. Farage.

In an interview in a concentration of reforms in the United Kingdom in March, John McDermottroe, a party supporter, said that many people in his Stockton-on-Tees region, in the northeast of England, felt that the work “had become working people.”

As for Mr. Farage, “he is very charismatic, he communicates with people from all sectors of life, he tells how it is,” said McDermottroe.

The fragmentation that Mr. Farage has unleashed about British policy was felt for a moment in the reform of the lost races, including the mayor of a region known as the West of England.

Helen Godwin of Labor won that with only a quarter of the vote, which put it only a little ahead of reform uk, while even the part of the fifth place won 14 percent of the votes.

Less than a third of eligible voters issued a vote, the type of low participation that is common in local elections. But that Mrs. Godwin was chosen by only 7.5 percent of eligible voters, Gavin Barwell, former chief of cabinet at Downing Street and member of the Conservative Party of the opposition, said on social networks, and added that there was a “collapse” or the bipartite political system.

That can still be an exaggeration.

Due to a reorganization, the number of seats played in the local elections on Thursday was the smallest since 1975, and electoral participation is always low in such careers.

The next proposal of the general elections of Great Britain, when the proposal will prove that the products pursued do not have to be heroes until 2029, and the challenges prior to the bipartisan domain have faded.

In the early 1980s, the Social Democratic Party, founded by moderate disenchanted from the Labor Party, promised to “break the mold” or British politics. In alliance with another centrist party, Letly exceeded 50 percent in an opinion survey. That proved to be a false dawn.

However, with five games that now compete for the votes in a system that adapts to two, British policy has become deeply unpredictable.

Born from the trade union movement, work was seen as the work of the working class, with its heart in the industrial north and in the middle of the nation. Traditionally, conservatives represented rich and medium classes, with predominantly concentrated support in the south.

The loss of these ties had already weakened the grip of the two main parties. In the general elections of last year, the vote combined by the Labor and the conservatives fell below 60 percent for the first time since before 1922, and the victory of Labor land landslides was achieved in almost 34 percent of the votes. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party in favor of Independence has remodeled politics.

Mr. Starmer now faces an enigma: if work work attacks the right to appease Mr. Farage’s supporters, runs the risk of losing the support of their progressive base to liberal or green democrats.

Mrs. Ainsley said work faces “a huge challenge” in the context of a tight tight about government spending, but added that it must focus on delivery for voters who still suffer a jump in the cost of living.

Conservatives face an even greater threat of reform, as well as their own challenge. Conservatives need to recover voters who have moved to Mr. Farage without moving so far to the right that they take more conservatives to centrist liberal democrats.

Politologists also say that a change is being made that could transform the fortune of the reform, Bar taking what has been a protest match and turning into a force that could fulfill their ambition to replace conservatives as the main opposition party.

The parliamentary elections of Great Britain operate under a system known as “first past of the position” in which the candidate who wins the largest number of votes in each of the 650 is chosen. Until now, that has generally disadvantaged to narrower parties.

“When it came to Lib’s Democrats who tried to break the duopoly of labor history, a general rule was that they, and their predecessor parties, needed at least 30 percent to overcome the biases inherent in the first past,” Peter Kellner wrote.

With more parts in containment and without dominant force, the calculations are changing. “The turning point for a part like the reform is no longer 30 percent. It is likely about 25 percent. That’s where they are in surveys,” he added.

Professor Ford said that he agreed that something fundamental was changing and that the reform was now “well enough for the first past to stop being his enemy and become his friend.”

After the last electoral results, said Professor Ford, it is “much easier for Nigel Farage to say” we are the true opposition party “, and it is more difficult for people to laugh when they say it.”