How transformed would UK politics be if Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party had won close to 100 seats in the recent election?
Under the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system, the party took just five seats despite securing 14 per cent of the vote, the third-largest vote share of any party.
But if the vote had taken place under a more representative electoral system such as Ireland’s, things would look quite different.
According to the Electoral Reform Society, if the UK vote had taken place under the additional-member system of PR (proportional representation) used for the Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections, Reform would have won 94 seats.
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The additional-member system is essentially a hybrid system, with half of the representatives elected via the UK’s traditional first-past-the-post system and the rest by a list system where parties are allocated the remaining seats on the basis of their vote share.
Under this system, Labour’s monster 411-seat tally (achieved with just 35 per cent of the vote) would have been reduced 236. So instead of controlling nearly two-thirds of seats in the House of Commons, the party would command just a third.
It’s reasonable to assume that Ireland’s single-transferable-vote version of PR would also have delivered similar seat tallies.
There has been a sea-change in UK politics but the country’s electoral system has maintained, on paper at least, the traditional see-saw swing between Tories and Labour.
“You have given us a clear mandate,” Labour leader Keir Starmer said after his party’s landslide win but the vote share percentages do anything but.
Many see Farage’s pro-Brexit, anti-immigration platform as a Maga-like takeover of the UK right. As the UK Independence Party, as the Brexit Party and now as Reform UK, Farage has remoulded the Conservative Party from the outside. He was even considered by some as a possible successor to Conservative leader Rishi Sunak.
[ Senior National Rally figures regroup following French election setbackOpens in new window ]
France’s idiosyncratic two-round electoral system also appears to have stemmed the rise of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) party.
Despite taking pole position in the first round of the recent parliamentary elections, tactical voting in the final round (opponents effectively placed a cordon sanitaire around the RN) relegated it to third. Le Pen has blamed pre-election deals and president Emmanuel Macron himself for creating a political stalemate, an argument she will no doubt mine with her disgruntled voter base.
In the UK and France, traditional, incumbent-favouring voting systems have muted the surge in support for the far right. Despite, in theory, providing a more open route for new political groupings, Ireland’s single-transferable-vote version of PR has delivered only Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil-led governments since the foundation of the State.
And while concern about immigration has mushroomed to become perhaps the single biggest issue in the Republic, anti-immigration candidates made only a limited breakthrough in the recent local elections.
It would be wrong to assume the French and UK election results represent a triumph for liberalism, however. The far right is still on the rise globally and this could reach a crescendo in the US in November if Donald Trump beats Joe Biden in the presidential election.
If politics has become a mutually exclusive culture war, the economic populism of the right has gone mainstream.
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which promised huge investment in US-built green infrastructure and industry, mirrors Trump’s America First doctrine in that both represent a shift away from globalisation and free trade in favour of protecting native industries.
Over the last three decades, the US has haemorrhaged manufacturing jobs, losing close to five million since 2000. The decline has been unprecedented by US standards and has created, or at least compounded, what is often referred to as a rust belt from the Midwest to the Great Lakes, an area that spans from western New York to Michigan and north Illinois.
It was once the backbone of US industry but it has now become synonymous with economic decline and depopulation. The reason for this hollowing-out is still debated.
The traditional explanation is technology and automation but Trump has continually blamed China. He claims hard-working citizens have been sold out for corporate America and that the offshoring of US manufacturing jobs is directly linked to the introduction of China into the global trading system since 2000.
Both US presidential candidates are now competing to raise the stakes against China. A more hardened stance against Beijing is perhaps the only remaining bipartisan issue left in a deeply divided US political system.
Far-right parties have used immigration to exploit grievances about healthcare, housing and the cost of living. This has pushed centrist parties into adopting more hardline stances, including the outsourcing of immigration management to neighbouring countries.
Germany is considering plans to process asylum claims outside the EU in a bid to curb illegal immigration. It wasn’t long ago that former German chancellor Angela Merkel was being feted for providing asylum to one million Syrian and Iraqi refugees.
It is just one more sign of how fast the West’s political imperatives are changing.
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