Populists shut out of European political systems that favor establishment parties

LONDON - Voters abandoned mainstream center-right parties for the populist right in the U.K. and French elections this month but failed to convert support to electoral gains amid a right-wing vote split and tactical voting by the left.

Britain’s Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, won a landslide election victory, scoring 412 seats in the 650-seat Parliament, eclipsing the mainstream Conservative Party that managed to hold on to just 121 seats after losing 244 seats. 

This was the worst performance in the Conservatives’ nearly two-century history amid the surge of upstart populist Reform Party, led by ‘British Trump’ Nigel Farage, that received over four million votes but gained only five seats.

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Nigel Farage, Leader of Reform UK and local candidate Mark Butcher watch the Denmark v. England UEFA EURO 2024 game at the Armfield club on June 20, 2024, in Blackpool, England. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images) (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

In France, a broad leftist coalition consisting of hardline communists, environmentalists and socialists won 188 out of 577 seats in the parliament, seconded by French President Emmanuel Macron's centrist alliance Ensemble (ENS), which won 161 seats, forming a ruling majority. 

France’s populist National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, won over 37% of the vote and was the single most popular party among French voters, yet it came third in the number of parliament seats. The mainstream center-right Republicans came a distant fourth, with just 6.2% of the vote.

"What was quite clear was that this was a rejection of the Conservative Party, the mainstream Conservative party," Alan Mendoza, the executive director of the London-based Henry Jackson Society, told Fox News Digital. "In France, they got a very high turnout for France, and in that case, it was clear that this was an anti-National Rally election."

Marine Le Pen, President of the National Rally group in the National Assembly, joins Jordan Bardella, President of the National Rally (Rassemblement National), at the final rally before the recently held European Parliament election on June 9th, (Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images) (Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The elections demonstrated the voters’ persistent support for political movements embracing right-wing populism on issues related to immigration, crime and social issues while abandoning milquetoast traditional center-right parties for failing to bring meaningful change.

Yet, the insurgent populists came up short of converting the widespread support at the voting booth to electoral gains due to tactical voting agreements and support split among right-leaning voters.

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"In both cases, the left-wing parties were able to maximize their votes, and the right-wing parties were not able to maximize their votes," Mendoza said. "It's been said that Labour's support is a mile wide and an inch deep, but that's what you need to win British elections with large numbers of support without being focused in certain areas," Mendoza added about Labour’s lower overall popular support.

"The reality in France was that various left-wing parties and Macron got together and basically shut the right out, but the right did not do a similar thing. The Republicans stayed in the race and did not give way to the National Rally or vice versa."

French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron leave the voting booth before voting for the second round of the legislative elections in Le Touquet-Paris-Plage, northern France, Sunday, July 7, 2024. (AP)

Le Pen’s National Rally came out on top in the first round of voting last month after campaigning on significantly reducing immigration and crime and improving the economy. 

The populist party was on the cusp of winning the majority of seats in the second round, but the effort was curtailed after a tactical election agreement was struck between Macron’s centrists and the leftist coalition. Both parties agreed to withdraw candidates to avoid splitting the anti-National Rally vote.

Farage’s Reform Party was the third-most-popular party with over four million votes across the U.K., but due to Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, in which the candidate with the most votes in the area wins the seat, the party ended up with just 1% of the seats in the parliament. 

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Farmers hold flags of European countries as they gather to listen to leaders' speeches during a protest in Brussels, Tuesday, June 4, 2024. Farmers groups hope to sweep the Green Deal climate pact off the table. (AP Photo/Omar Havana) (AP Photo/Omar Havana)

The mainstream Conservatives got over two million more votes than the Reform Party but remain the second-largest political force in the country, prompting calls to reform the electoral system to give more representation based on the total votes.

Despite winning a historic number of seats in the U.K. Parliament, the Labour Party won the election with 9.6 million votes, down by over 600,000 votes, compared to its 2019 election results, when the party led under controversial socialist Jeremy Corbyn suffered two separate election defeats.

"In some cases, the Reform vote was probably mostly conservatives who had left the Conservative Party and decided to go there. But the far bigger component in Britain's case was people who just decided not to vote at all," Mendoza said. "The Conservative vote share went down 20 points, and a lot of conservatives who voted Conservative in 2019 just stayed at home and were not inspired by any of the parties."

Labour Party leader Keir Starmer speaks to his supporters at the Tate Modern in London, Friday, July 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

In the 2019 election, the Conservatives, under the leadership of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, won the majority of the parliament seats after campaigning on a populist platform of "Get Brexit Done." The Reform Party’s predecessor, the Brexit Party, stood down its candidates in the election to boost the Conservatives.

In the aftermath of the elections, influential Conservative figures argued that the "Conservative family" consisting of the Reform Party and the Conservatives still beat Labour and won the majority of the votes – over 11 million – indicating the voters’ overall right-leaning bent.

Suella Braverman, a potential Conservative Party leadership contender, criticized the party’s performance in a speech at the Popular Conservatives conference and urged the party to embrace populism for the sake of the party’s future.

"To my mind, the Reform phenomenon was entirely predictable and avoidable and all our own fault," she told the audience. "It’s no good denigrating Reform voters, it’s no good smearing the Reform party, it’s no good comparing Reform rallies to the rallies of Nuremberg. That’s not going to work. Criticizing people for voting Reform is a fundamental error to make."

French President Emmanuel Macron, right, meets French far-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen at the Élysée Palace on June 21, 2022, in Paris. (Ludovic Marin/Pool/AP)

She further urged the Conservatives to "restore credibility on the core conservative policies that unite" and address the immigration issue, "because we've been weak, we've been squeamish, we failed to tackle this very pressing concern."

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In France, although failing to gain legislative power, National Rally maintains populist momentum and is eyeing the 2027 presidential elections, with Le Pen primed to take control of the country's highest office.

The new parliamentary majority of leftists and centrists, meanwhile, leaves Macron, already deeply unpopular, facing the prospect of presiding over a politically paralyzed hung parliament.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.