Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen are victims of their country’s electoral system, he writes Matthijs van Schie.
The Labor Party became the big winner of the British election on Thursday, July 4. The party gets as many as 211 lower house seats and now has 412 seats out of 650 seats. However, the party received only 1.5 percentage points more votes than in 2019. The party lost the same year’s election overwhelmingly to Boris Johnson’s conservatives. Last week it lost as much as 20 percentage points of its vote share and lost 250 seats.
Lots of votes, few places for Farage
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK gained a large part of the votes lost to the Tories. His party received 4.1 million votes, more than 14 percent of the votes cast. But these will give the ex-Brexit party no more than four seats. This is due to the district system: the largest party in the constituency wins the seat, all other parties’ votes are worthless. The British call it that too first-the-post-system.
“The electoral system needs reform,” writes Reform UK X. “Our new government does not reflect how the people voted. This is not true democracy.
The image below shows the difference in the two graphs. “How Did You Vote” (How You Voted) shows a pie chart where red is the largest color for Labour, but dark blue (Conservatives) and light blue (Reform UK) also have a significant share. ‘What you have’ (What you got) shows a pie chart where the red piece has nearly doubled in size, the dark blue piece has shrunk significantly, and the light blue piece has almost disappeared.
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Our new government does not reflect how the people voted.
This is not real democracy. #reform pic.twitter.com/aHDn1RZHPh
– Reform UK (@reformparty_uk) July 7, 2024
The leader of the Reform Party, Farage, also shares a picture of X, where the share of votes is compared to the share of seats. He said Thursday’s election result was “the most disproportionate in British history”.
The Electoral Reform Society says it was the most disproportionate election in British history. pic.twitter.com/cmWFHSDi04
— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) July 6, 2024
Le Pen from third to second round
In France, the left also achieved a victory in the parliamentary elections, which it did not expect at the beginning. After the first round of voting on Sunday 30 June, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) was still the largest party with more than 33% of the vote.
But then there still had to be a second round, held in constituencies where no party has achieved an absolute majority after the first round. To prevent the RN from becoming the largest, the left-wing Nouveau Front Popculaire (NFP) or center bloc Ensemble withdrew a candidate from hundreds of constituencies to give the other a better chance of staying ahead of Le Pen’s party. Successful: NFP got 180 seats, Ensemble 163 seats and RN 143 seats.
If the scores are looked at by individual parties rather than blocs, the RN appears to be by far the largest party in France with 126 seats (17 seats go to Les Républicains candidates who supported the RN). Macron’s Renaissance got 98 seats and La France Insoumise, considered the big winner of the election, got 71 seats.
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Composition of the new National Assembly by group and party https://t.co/1g1sU3y1K2 pic.twitter.com/CK9JQFONnR
– Yiorgos Vassalos (@YiorgosVa) July 8, 2024
RN’s popularity is also reflected in its voice share. Even after the tactical cooperation of the left and the center bloc, Le Pen’s party received 37.4 percent of the vote (over 10 million votes), while the NFP received 26.8 percent (over 7 million votes) and the Ensemble 22.3 percent (over 10 million votes). 6.5 million votes).
For example, something similar to Reform UK in Great Britain happened to Le Pen’s party. Both right-wing nationalist parties needed far more votes for the seat than their rivals. Millions of votes for the RN and Reform proved worthless as the parties did not come first in many constituencies.
As in Reform UK, frustration is high in the RN. French newspaper World to quote unnamed members at a party meeting in Paris on Sunday night: “It’s a mess… They cheated.” At the meeting, Macron and the left-wing bloc are accused of “adventurism” and “conspiracy”.
Party leader Marine Le Pen reacted more optimistically. With X, he credits “the ten million voters who made the RN the leading party” in terms of votes and MPs. “The tide continues to rise and our victory is now only postponed.”
The Electoral College in the United States is controversial
In recent years, the electoral system has been the subject of discussion in the United States as well. Certainly in 2016, when Donald Trump, thanks to the electoral system (electoral college) won the presidential election, while Hillary Clinton received about three million more votes and in the elections vote won. A year later, Clinton supported the abolition of the Electoral College. Ironically, in 2012, Trump called the Electoral College a “disaster for democracy.”
A survey conducted by the research company Pew Research in September shows that about two-thirds of Americans are in favor electoral college. They want to see the winner’s absolute number of votes.
Debate over the Electoral College could flare up again around the November 5th US election. In recent decades referendum always for the Democratic candidate. In 2004, George W. Bush was the last Republican to receive more votes in absolute terms than his Democratic challenger. According to a poll by the authoritative site FiveThirtyEight, Joe Biden is… referendum in the lead, while Trump is a comfortable favorite for the presidency according to most polls.