Reform UK Surges as Conservatives Lose Seats: 4 Local Elections Takeaways

While the votes in England’s local elections were still being counted on Friday, Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. party emerged as the biggest winner of the first major polls since Labour swept into government last summer.

Voters have been selecting councilors for about 1,600 municipal seats in 23 areas, as well as six regional mayors.

Here are four takeaways from a night that saw Britain’s two major political parties suffer significant losses.

Reform U.K. is a serious force in British politics.

The right-wing populist party headed by Mr. Farage won a special election in Runcorn and Helsby, in northwestern England, giving it five lawmakers in Parliament. The party also won the mayoralty in Greater Lincolnshire, a new position, and is gaining council seats across the country.

The party was initially called the Brexit Party but rebranded itself after Britain formally withdrew from the European Union.

Results on Friday indicated that Reform’s efforts to shed its image as a single-issue party and appeal to a broader range of voters were bearing fruit. Brexit is now rarely discussed by its politicians, who have been focusing on a hard line on immigration.

Reform contested its highest number of seats ever in the local elections, after a series of regional political rallies where attendees were urged to sign up as candidates and were rapidly vetted using artificial intelligence.

Mr. Farage seems to have learned from President Trump about campaign strategy by holding events attended by thousands of people in recent months.

England is in a new era of multiparty politics.

While Reform was the biggest winner, the Conservatives and Labour were the biggest losers. The two parties, who have dominated British politics for decades, lost municipal seats not just to Reform but also to the centrist Liberal Democrats and the left-wing Green Party.

Luke Tryl, executive director of More In Common U.K., a political research group, said the results reflected many voters’ “total disillusionment.”

“In our focus groups, there is just this real sense that the status quo isn’t working for anyone, and what you’re seeing in the results is that frustration play out,” he said. “If you look at British politics since Brexit it’s been the public pressing the button saying, ‘We want change’. They don’t feel they’ve got it, and the result of that is that politics is splintering away from the typical mainstream.”

Mr. Tryl said that for many voters he had interviewed, choosing Reform was a “roll of the dice” because of deep unhappiness with the last Conservative government and with Labour’s performance so far.

Turnout was low. Only 46 percent of eligible voters took part in the Runcorn special election and 30 percent in the race for the Greater Lincolnshire mayor.

Labour had a bad night, but it could have been worse.

While the governing party lost several major races and council seats, there were some silver linings for Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

The Runcorn special election was lost to Reform by just six votes after a dramatic recount, while Labour retained three mayoral positions in Doncaster, North Tyneside and the West of England.

The results appeared to continue an international trend of incumbent governments being punished in the polls.

Akash Paun, program director for the Institute for Government research institute, said local elections had long been a “vehicle for protest voting.”

“Even less than a year into the Labour government, it’s quite obvious that there is a lot of dissatisfaction and frustration,” he said. “There was no lengthy honeymoon that new prime ministers seem to expect.”

Mr. Paun said that while last year’s general election was hailed as a “Labour landslide,” the party received only 34 percent of the national vote.

“There wasn’t a huge wave of support in the first place,” he noted.

The Conservatives are in a difficult place.

Less than a year after losing a record 251 parliamentary seats at the general election, the party is facing the loss of hundreds of municipal seats.

Attacked by Reform to the right and the Liberal Democrats to the left, the Tories are facing what some experts describe as an existential crisis.

Patrick English, director of political analytics at YouGov, a polling company, said the Conservatives could take limited comfort from the fact that they were defending local elections from a “very high watermark” set in 2021, when the party was buoyed by a wave of support for Boris Johnson’s response to the Covid pandemic.

But, he added, “The context in English local elections is that if you’re the opposition, you should be doing well and you should be winning. But the Conservatives aren’t doing well because they’re fighting for their political life on the right with the threat from Reform.”

The Tories’ current leader, Kemi Badenoch, is not broadly popular, but there is no obvious successor, and party officials fear a fresh round of infighting.

The Conservative parliamentary group has shrunk so significantly that party bosses have raised the threshold for provoking a confidence vote in the leader, so Ms. Badenoch may remain in post for a while.