Even in a terrible year for incumbents and ruling parties across the globe, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Britain’s long-dominant Conservatives stand out.
Unless virtually all the polls and pundits are wrong, Mr. Sunak’s Conservatives are on track to be toppled when voters go to the polls on July 4, with the center-left Labor opposition party set to take power for the first time since 2010.
But it’s the expected scope of the rejection of the Tories that is turning heads: Some polls say the Conservatives could end up with as few as 50 seats in the 650-seat British House of Commons (the party currently has 275 seats). Mr. Sunak could suffer the indignity of becoming the first sitting prime minister to lose his seat in Parliament since Arthur Balfour did 118 years ago.
“The U.K. system is one that can produce radical shifts,” said Tony Travers, a professor with the London School of Economics Department of Government. “The likelihood is that we’ll see another radical shift in the next election.”
The embattled Mr. Sunak — the fifth Conservative prime minister since now-Foreign Minister David Cameron led the party to a sweeping victory 14 years ago — and his party have not helped themselves with a series of gaffes and missteps during the campaign.
When the prime minister announced the snap early vote back in May outside 10 Downing Street, he was being pelted by a heavy rainstorm — interpreted by many as a heavenly sign of his struggles handling basic day-to-day duties. Making things worse, top aides in Mr. Sunak’s administration have been caught up in a fresh scandal involving reported betting on when the vote would be called.
Separately, Mr. Sunak, 44, was criticized as the only leader from a major World War II Allied power to skip the recent, highly publicized 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. He also based his refugee policy on an increasingly controversial deal to send would-be asylum-seekers to Rwanda, the African nation nearly 5,000 miles from Britain, drawing fierce criticism from human rights groups.
Compounding Mr. Sunak’s woes has been the emergence of Reform U.K., led by well-known conservative figure Nigel Farage, which is cutting into the government’s share of right-leaning voters.
Fatigued
But the biggest trend hurting Mr. Sunak and the Conservatives may be simple voter fatigue, according to Mark Thatcher, a European public policy professor at Italy’s LUISS University and the author of several books on the British political system.
Mr. Thatcher said British voters have clearly wearied of Conservative leadership after nearly a decade and a half, a period that has included a succession of polarizing policies and politicians from the momentous Brexit referendum of 2016 to the tumult-filled terms of former Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
“Fourteen years is a very long time,” Mr. Thatcher said in an interview. “That’s around the length of time one-party control tends to last before people want a change, and that is especially true after a period in which the Conservatives had such a contrast in personalities and leadership styles while in charge.”
The beneficiary of Mr. Sunak’s troubles will almost surely be Keir Starmer, the low-key 61-year-old lawyer who has headed the Labor Party for the last four years and has been in politics for less than a decade. Uncharismatic and managerial, Mr. Starmer is credited by analysts with bringing his party to the center, distancing Labor from its more extreme, far-left elements while exhibiting a kind of cautious, quiet competence.
“Labor is occupying the middle ground,” Mr. Travers said. “Starmer’s Labor Party is not part of the anti-business left. It’s got a reputation for being reasonably moderate, reasonably reliable, reasonably united, and not in favor of new taxes. That’s how you win elections.”
Mr. Starmer also has emphasized his humble origins. He was knighted as the top state prosecutor — his full, legal name is Sir Keir Rodney Starmer — but his father was a toolmaker and his mother a nurse, and the family was strapped for cash in his youth.
The Labor leader is an avid soccer fan (his favorite team is Arsenal, which plays in a decidedly un-posh part of North London), a sport he still plays as often as he can. His wife, Victoria Starmer, works in occupational health and their two children keep a low profile.
“Starmer was a very important lawyer and prosecutor and then a member of Parliament, but it is well known he comes from a modest family,” Mr. Thatcher said. “It’s something most people in the U.K. can identify with.”
That stands in contrast with Mr. Sunak, a former Goldman Sachs banker, whose wife, Akshata Murty, is the daughter of an Indian internet technology billionaire.
Incumbent woes
Mr. Sunak’s problems may be uniquely deep, but his plight mirrors that of incumbents on the left and right across the world this year.
Once-dominant ruling parties in South Africa and India saw their wings clipped in parliamentary votes this year, while President Biden faces a difficult rematch with former President Donald Trump in November. Opposition parties are surging in allied democracies against figures such as left-center Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and center-right South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.
Just three days after the British vote Thursday, French voters in a second round of voting could deliver a stinging rebuke to centrist President Emmanuel Macron by giving the far-right National Rally party its first-ever majority in the national parliament.
While Mr. Starmer has been cautious in his public comments ahead of the vote, Mr. Sunak is talking tough in the final days, despite the political headwinds.
“I think people are waking up to the real danger of what a Labor government means,” the prime minister told The Associated Press in an interview over the weekend, rejecting the charge that Britain’s status in the world has fallen during the Conservatives’ long hold on power. “It’s entirely wrong, this kind of declinist narrative that people have of the U.K. I wholeheartedly reject,” he said. Britain “is a better place to live than it was in 2010.”
In 2016, the controversial Brexit vote that saw the U.K. withdraw from the European Union presaged conservative Mr. Trump’s victory over Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton five months later. There is speculation that Thursday’s vote could give a foretaste of what to expect in the U.S. in November, but the message may be mixed.
“There’s no clear parallel between the two elections this time around,” Mr. Travers said. “If Trump wins in the U.S., then we can say both countries rejected their incumbents, and if Biden wins, we can say the U.K. vote showed the value of a methodical center-left governing style.”
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