The smiling Boris Johnson who went to the polls on Thursday (5) with Dilyn, his dog, could seem unconcerned with the result of the regional elections. A very different way from the one he and his supporters woke up to this Friday (6).
The partial results of the vote reveal that the Conservative Party, the party of Boris, lost control of traditional strongholds in London and suffered setbacks in other regions, with voters taking advantage of the election to deposit a message in the polls of repudiation of the series of scandals of his government. —with “partygate” being the main one.
The initial scenario follows, in part, what analysts and researches predicted. The setback for Boris, it is true, is more in the field of the symbolic, since the thousands of seats in municipal and district councils do not, in theory, have a direct impact on national politics.
The prime minister’s party lost, for example, control of the Westminster council, in the London region, which has been administered by the Conservatives since its creation in 1964. Barnet’s, under almost continuous command of the prime minister’s acronym since 1964 — except in two elections.
The current election will decide nearly 7,000 city council seats, including all of London, Scotland and Wales, and a third of the seats in the rest of England.
A count by The Guardian newspaper shows that, so far, the Conservatives have lost 284 seats, while Labor has gained 171. There are also considerable shares left for other parties, such as the Liberals, who gained 150 more seats – some of which analysts predicted would go in burden for labor.
The BBC, based on initial results, estimated what would happen if the whole country were voting in this Thursday’s election. In this scenario, 30% of the votes would go to the Conservatives, 35% to Labor and 19% to the Liberals. The rest would be split between smaller acronyms.
Labor’s five-point lead over the Conservatives is the biggest since the 2012 regional election. By contrast, with their 30% share, the Conservatives are down five percentage points from 2018 and six points from last year — when they were also held regionally, but on a smaller scale.
In comments after the first numbers were released, Boris relativized the loss for his acronym. “We’ve had a rough night in some parts of the country, but on the other hand, in others we see the Conservatives moving forward and making remarkable gains in places that haven’t voted for the party in a long time,” he said.
He then added the lessons he thinks he has learned from what he calls the “voters’ message”: “They want us to focus on the big issues that matter to them, like the recovery [econômica] post-Covid, the energy supply problems and the inflation spike, and that we continue our agenda of more jobs and higher wages”.
Although regional elections generally distance themselves from major national political issues, the series of scandals that have involved the prime minister has led his own coreligionists to seek distance. Some of the candidates who, under normal circumstances, might try to capitalize on being in the same party as the head of government did the opposite: they presented themselves as “local conservatives.”
And the call came as soon as the first results emerged, with conservatives saying that Boris will have to prove his integrity to the British and answer questions at the polls. “Clearly the prime minister has tough questions to answer; people were very hopeful about the government’s policies, but now they’re not happy with what they’ve heard about partygate,” David Simmonds, a Conservative MP, told the Guardian.
Setbacks for workers too
Labor leader Keir Starmer described the partial results as “absolutely fantastic”. “Believe me: this is a big turning point for us,” he said later in the morning.
Shortly after, however, he found himself involved in a case similar to the one that spilled over during the administration of his political rival, Boris Johnson. British police have announced that they will investigate Starmer for a possible breach of isolation rules to contain the spread of the coronavirus last year. The case was dubbed “beergate”.
In April of that year, the Labor politician was seen drinking beer with co-workers during a meeting in Hartlepool, northeast England. Local police had said they had concluded that no crime had been committed, but on Friday said they had opened an investigation after receiving new information.
LIKELY CHANGES IN NORTHERN IRELAND
Voting in Northern Ireland, a country of approximately 1.9 million people, also carries significant weight, but for other reasons. Voting polls suggest that the Republican Sinn Fein party, a former political arm of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), should become the main political force and thus elect the prime minister.
Prepared by the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool, the latest poll on the choice of the 90 deputies of the regional assembly, published on Tuesday (3), gives 26.6% of the votes to Sinn Fein and 18.2% to the Democratic Unionist Party. (DUP).
If the projections are confirmed – the results will be released between Friday and Saturday (7) -, the party would become the first nationalist party to command the most seats in the regional assembly in 101 years, since the creation of Northern Ireland in 1921. .
Although the acronym has not mobilized its historic reunification agenda with the Republic of Ireland in the election campaign, focusing on issues such as inflation and the cost of living, this is the symbolic backdrop that is drawn if the party gains a majority.
Pro-UK parties, backed predominantly by the Protestant population, have dominated the nation for a century, but trends have long indicated that they would eventually be eclipsed by nationalist, predominantly Catholic parties flying the Irish Union flag. In the last election, in 2017, the unionist DUP won 28 seats, just ahead of Sinn Fein’s 27.
