After 100 years, the political system of two parties in Great Britain can crumble

A dramatic victory in one parliamentary special election. Hundreds of seats won in English municipalities. A first taste of power in the lower levels of the government.

By making extensive profit in A series of local elections Nigel Farage, one of the best known in Britain, held on Thursday in England Proponents of President Trump And the leader of the British anti-immigration reform of British reform, consolidated his reputation as the most important political disrupter in the country.

But he may have done something bigger: a hole blown in the country’s two-party-political system.

Almost the entire last century, power in Britain has alternated between the ruling Labor Party, now led by Prime Minister Keir Starmerand the opposition conservatives, who chose a new leader last year, Kemi Badenoch.

Yet with Rising support for reform And profits for other small parties, that duopoly has rarely seen more shaky.

“The two most important parties have become acquainted with a possible deportation from their 100-year term of office of Downing Street,” said Robert Ford, a professor in political sciences at the University of Manchester.

Still staggering after he was out of power last year, the conservatives still suffered a disastrous series of results. With the Flatline economy, labor was punished by voters who are angry with government spending and higher taxes that have been introduced since it came to power.

The electorate rejected both heads, said Professor Ford, adding that if a result was that this would occur in a general election: “The conservative party would cease to exist as a meaningful strength in parliament.”

Claire Ainsley, a former policy director for Mr. Starmer, said that the results also reflected that trends reflected in the longer term, including a breakdown of traditional classification among voters, the increasing appeal of nationalist politics and growing support for the central liberal democrats, the greg and the greed.

“We have seen the fragmentation of society and that has moved on to our politics,” said Mrs. Ainsley, who is now working in Great Britain for the Progressive Policy Institute, a research institute established in Washington. “There is now several votes.”

The result is that both most important parties are struggling because they not only compete with each other, but also with opponents to their political left and right.

This vote of public disappointment gave an opening to smaller parties, including the liberal Democrats, who won 163 council seats, and the Greens, who won 44. But the largest beneficiary was reform, whose supporters have been Energied by the powerful campaigns of Mr. Farage.

In an interview during a reform of the British rally in March, John McDermottroe, a party assistant, that many people in his region of Stockton-on-Tees, in northeastern England, said that the Labor party “had grown away from working people.”

As for Mr Farage: “He is very charismatic, he communicates with people from every sector of life, he tells it as it is,” said Mr. McDermottroe.

The fragmentation that Mr Farage has unleashed on British politics was even felt in the reform of the races, including the mayor of a region known as the west of England.

Helen Godwin van Labor won that with only a quarter of the moodAnd only put her on for reform UK, while even the fifth placed party won 14 percent of the votes.

Less than a third of the eligible voters issued a vote, the type of low turnout that is common in local elections. But that meant that Mrs. Godwin was chosen by only 7.5 percent of the eligible voters, Gavin Barwell, a former staff chef in Downing Street and member of the conservative party of the opposition, noted On social mediaAdding that there was a ‘collapse’ of the political system with two parties.

That can still be exaggerated.

Due to a reorganization, the number of seats that was disputed in the local elections on Thursday was the smallest since 1975, and the rise of voters is always low in such breeds.

The following general elections of Great Britain when that proposition will be correctly tested to be kept to be held until 2029 and earlier challenges for the dominance of two-parties have faded.

In the early 1980s, the Social -Democratic Party, founded by disappointed moderates of the Labor Party, promised to ‘break the form’ of British politics. In the alliance with another central party, it briefly crossed 50 percent An opinion poll. That turned out to be a false dawn.

But with five parties that are now fighting for votes in a system that was suitable for two, British politics has become deeply unpredictable.

Born from the trade union movement, work was once seen as the party of the working class, with its core land in the industrial north and center of the nation. Traditionally, conservatives represented the rich and middle class, with support mainly concentrated in the south.

The release of those tires had already weakened the grip of the two most important parties. In last year’s general elections, the combined voice for Labor and the conservatives fell below 60 percent for the first time Since before 1922And Labor’s landslide victory was reached at around 34 percent of the votes. In Scotland, the Pro-independence scottish National Party has reformed politics.

Mr. Starmer is now confronted with a mystery: if Labor tackles the right to the sympathizers of Mr. Farage to appease, it runs the risk of losing support from his progressive basis to the liberal Democrats or the Greens.

Mrs. Ainsley said that Labor stands for ‘a huge challenge’ in the context of tight pressure on government spending, but added that it should concentrate on supplying voters who still suffer from a leap in the costs of living.

The conservatives are confronted with an even greater threat to reform, as well as their own challenge. The tories must recapture voters who have shifted to Mr Farage without going so far to the right that they drive more liberal tories to the central liberal democrats.

Political scientists also say that a shift is going on that could transform the fortune of reform, which was taken a protest party and could make it a power that could make its ambition to replace the conservatives as the most important opposition party.

The parliamentary elections of Great -Britain work under a system that is known as “first beyond the position” in which the candidate who wins the most votes in each of the 650 constituents is chosen. Until now, that usually has subordinated smaller parties.

“When it was only the LIB DEMS who tried to break the duopoly of Labor-Tory, a rule of thumb was that they, and their predecessor parties, needed at least 30 percent to overcome the prejudices that are inherent in the first place,” wrote Peter Kellner, a poll expert.

With more parties contrary and not dominant power, the calculations change. “The turning point for a party such as reform is no longer 30 percent. It is probably around 25 percent. There they are in the polls,” he added.

Professor Ford said that he agreed that something had been shifting fundamentally and that the reform now “did well enough to first stop the position to be their enemy and to become their friend.”

After the last election results, Professor Ford said, it is “a lot easier for Nigel Farage to say:” We are the real party of opposition, “and it’s harder for people to laugh when he says so.”