British election a preview of U.S. contest

 

Gordon L. Weil

Before you pick a movie, you can often watch a trailer offering a brief preview, designed to induce you to see the whole feature.  Wouldn’t it be great if we now had a trailer for the 2024 election story?

It looks like a cliffhanger.  More than a struggle between two candidates or parties, it may be a drama about the changing country itself.

Breaking news:  a preview is now available.  This trailer is the British campaign, which leads to the U.K. election to be held on July 4, believe it or not.  Like all trailers, it leaves a lot out.  You can wait for the American version, but there’s much relevant across the pond.

The British electorate is mainly divided between the Labour Party, which has become moderately liberal, and the aptly named Conservative Party, also called the Tories.

Each voter is not of equal weight, just as in the U.S. presidential vote.  The population from one U.K. constituency to another may vary, just as the American electoral vote gives more influence to rural state voters. In neither country is there a national popularity contest despite national polling.

In the U.S., the Republican Party has been taken over by extreme right MAGA forces.  They label traditional GOP partisans as RINOs – Republicans in Name Only – and they are either driven out or marginalized. Where the RINOs end up on Election Day and what they do might have a major effect on presidential and congressional elections.

In Britain, the hard-right takes the form of the Reform Party, created to promote Brexit, when the U.K. left the European Union.  Nigel Farage, its leader, is closely aligned with Donald Trump.  Reform will take votes away from the Tories.  In fact, combined with them, conservatives could come close in the polls to Labour, the expected winner by a landslide.

Farage comes across as a brash and outspoken leader, like Trump.  Rishi Sunak, the Tory Prime Minister, seems to be a wealthy technocrat out of touch with the people, and Keir Starmer, his presumed Labour successor, suffers from a charisma deficit.  Farage mirrors Trump, while Starmer, though much younger, recalls Biden’s diminished dynamism.

Both MAGA and the Reform Party favor more authoritarian rule but less government regulation and taxes.  Political opinion may be flowing in their direction.  Last week, in elections for the European Parliament, right-wing parties across the Continent made big gains, pushing governments in France and Belgium to call for immediate, new national elections.

The agendas of the right-wing, from the U.K. to the EU to the U.S., reject the legacy of the Second World War.  After that global conflict, international cooperation emerged as the alternative to more wars.  Traditional nationalism was to fade in favor of alliances and peacekeepers.  The U.N., NATO and the EU itself were the tools.

But nationalism is back. The expected value of international organizations has not been realized and they have mostly weakened.  Sunak and Farage even talk of taking the U.K. out of the European Convention on Human Rights, an effective judicial organization that Britain helped create. 

Even the U.S., China and Russia increasingly look inward. The right-wing agenda has become popular around the world. 

Conservatives divide in Europe, with the extreme and nationalist elements rising, as is also true in the U.S.  Many Republicans seem ready to let Ukraine fall to Russia.  Reform might win more votes, if not more seats, than the Tories.  The British election could be a preview of the U.S. vote.

While Donald Trump is really his own political party, he has successfully adopted the hard right’s demands as his platform and path back to the White House.  Having found their spokesman and been legitimized by him, extreme conservatives want to pursue the same kind of policies as the Reform Party.

There must be one reservation about all this, as the U.K. trailer shows – the unexpected event that can change everything.

Sunak abandoned the D-Day anniversary events in France to do a political interview, causing major outrage even from his own party.  He assured his defeat and may have given Reform an election boost that could kill the Tories, just as MAGA is killing the GOP.

Either Biden or Trump could make a major campaign error or age could catch up with them. That could change everything.

This year, the U.K. trailer may be a preview of coming attractions.  How can the U.S. save its system and avoid the chaotic change that may be this year’s scenario?

The national popular vote for president, approved by Maine, would make every citizen’s vote equal.  Either Maine’s ranked-choice voting or California’s primary for candidates of all parties, with the “top two” meeting in the general election, deal with fracturing parties.

But the U.K. preview reveals that politics this year could be a horror show.