LONDON – While populist right-wing parties gained significant voter support in recent elections in the UK and France, they failed to translate this support into electoral gains due to a split right-wing vote and strategic voting by the left.

In the UK, the Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, achieved a resounding victory, securing 412 seats in the 650-seat Parliament, far surpassing the mainstream Conservative Party, which managed to hold onto just 121 seats after losing 244 seats. 

This marked the worst performance in the Conservatives’ history, coinciding with the rise of the populist Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage, known as the “British Trump.” Despite receiving over four million votes, the Reform Party gained only five seats.

In France, a broad leftist coalition, encompassing hardline communists, environmentalists, and socialists, secured 188 out of 577 seats in the parliament. French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance, Ensemble (ENS), came in second with 161 seats, forming a ruling majority. 

France’s populist National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, garnered over 37% of the vote, making it the most popular party among French voters. However, it finished third in terms of parliamentary seats. The mainstream center-right Republicans trailed far behind, securing 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 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.”

These elections highlighted voters’ ongoing support for political movements embracing right-wing populism on issues such as immigration, crime, and social issues. However, voters abandoned traditional center-right parties, perceiving them as ineffective in bringing meaningful change.

Despite widespread support at the ballot box, the insurgent populists fell short of converting this support into electoral gains due to tactical voting agreements and a split right-leaning vote.

“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.”

Le Pen’s National Rally emerged as the leading party in the first round of voting last month, having campaigned on significantly reducing immigration and crime and improving the economy. 

The populist party was on the verge of securing a majority of seats in the second round but was thwarted after Macron’s centrists and the leftist coalition reached an agreement. Both parties agreed to withdraw candidates to prevent a split in the anti-National Rally vote.

Farage’s Reform Party emerged as the third most popular party in the UK, garnering over four million votes. However, due to Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, where the candidate with the most votes in a particular area wins the seat, the party ended up with just 1% of the seats in Parliament. 

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

Despite securing a historic number of seats in the UK Parliament, the Labour Party won the election with 9.6 million votes, a decrease of over 600,000 votes compared to its 2019 election results. In 2019, the party, led by 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.”

In the 2019 election, the Conservatives, under the leadership of former Prime Minister , won the majority of parliamentary seats after campaigning on a populist platform of “Get Brexit Done.” The Reform Party’s predecessor, the Brexit Party, withdrew its candidates in the election to support the Conservatives.

Following the elections, influential Conservative figures argued that the “Conservative family,” encompassing the Reform Party and the Conservatives, had still outperformed Labour, winning the majority of votes – over 11 million – suggesting a right-leaning inclination among voters.

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 its 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.”

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.”

In France, despite failing to gain legislative power, the National Rally maintains populist momentum and is targeting the 2027 presidential elections, with Le Pen aiming to take control of the country’s highest office.

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