Labour leader and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer speaks to the media as he enters 10 Downing Street on July 5. Photo: Getty Images
For the past two weeks, the main political story in the U.S. has been pretty inescapable. President Joe Biden’s performance in the first debate of the 2024 campaign was horrific, and an increasing number of voters, officials, and pundits are begging him to retire before the election in November. So far, he and his inner circle are doubling down, and the three-and-a-half months until Election Day are shaping up to be an increasingly frustrating, depressing slog.
But beyond the Biden prognostication, there’s been a bright spot on the politics front. Multiple, in fact. Citizens of the United Kingdom and France not only got to vote in elections held mere weeks after they were called (instead of the American months-if-not-years-long electoral process) but they…made good choices?? On July 4, British voters declared their freedom from nearly 15 years of Conservative governments by voting in the Labour Party and making Keir Starmer prime minister. And on July 7, French voters delivered a shock victory to the left, relegating the far-right (and presumptive winner) to third place. Good news can still exist, it seems.
If you’ve been too busy mainlining American political news (or if you’re smart and have chosen to look away until absolutely necessary), here’s a recap to get you up to speed on politics beyond these 50 states.
According to British law, a general election must be held every five years (if not sooner). The last time Brits went to the polls was December 2019, so there pretty much had to be an election sometime this year. On May 22, (now former) Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a Conservative (aka Tory), called a vote for July 4.
Since the election four-and-a-half years ago, there had been three Conservative prime ministers, each uniquely bad at governing. Floppy-haired Boris Johnson held parties at the prime minister’s residence during lockdown, while regular British people were threatened with fines if they gathered indoors; Liz Truss loves cutting taxes so much she almost bankrupted the country and lasted just 49 days as prime minister; and Rishi Sunak has the charisma of an over-cooked zucchini and is obscenely rich—the type of rich that means you’d never have to work another day in your life, so why on earth would you subject yourself to the scrutiny of the political press??
In May, just 18% of voters said they planned to vote for the Tories. People were ready to be rid of them.
Why did I see so many memes about it?
Honestly…British politics is just really memeable. Then-Labour leader Ed Miliband basically lost the 2015 election because he ate a sandwich so weirdly that it went viral.
Sunak announced the election at a podium outside of 10 Downing Street in the pouring rain, while someone nearby played “Things Can Only Get Better” so loudly that the TV cameras picked it up.
The two main political parties, Labour and Conservatives, are not exactly analogous to Democrats and Republicans; Labour is historically a more left-wing party based in, you guessed it, working-class labor movements, and the Conservatives have not shifted as far right as quickly as the GOP. Labour won a landslide victory, with 412 (out of 650) seats. The Conservatives got a mere 121, losing over 250 seats they previously held.
A party now known as Reform (formerly the Brexit Party) has filled that void on the extreme right, and it successfully got five people elected to Parliament, including Nigel Farage, whose name you may have heard connected with Brexit. These guys are standard-issue anti-immigrant, racist “take our country back” types. (There’s also that sentiment in the Conservative Party, but they’re often better at hiding it.)
The centrist Liberal Democrats have been the U.K.’s third-biggest party for decades, and came in third last week, with 71 seats. Their leader, Ed Davey, spent the election campaign doing stunts (bungee jumping, surfing, getting a makeover on morning TV) and it was honestly pretty charming.
An important part of the electoral winners’ story is the five explicitly pro-Palestine independents who won in typical Labour strongholds. Labour’s position on Israel, Palestine, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza is similar to that of Democrats: basically shrugging and saying “Israel has a right to defend itself”—with the exception of a few principled members who’ve consistently condemned Israel’s violence and destruction. Jeremy Corbyn is one of those victorious independent candidates; he’s a dyed-in-the-wool old school socialist and was the Labour leader from 2015 to 2020, before he was kicked out of the party following a bizarre, messy (and broadly successful) campaign by the party’s right wing to demonize him as an antisemite.
And then the Scottish National Party; the Green Party; Sinn Féin (the lefty Irish republican party whose members protest the continued partition of Ireland by not taking their seats in Parliament); the Democratic Unionist Party (another Northern Irish Party, basically the opposite of Sinn Féin); and Plaid Cymru (a Welsh nationalist party) all also won a handful of seats apiece. OK, I think that’s it for that question.
So all things considered, this seems like a good result—right?
Definitely—especially because it means no more Tories in charge. Their decade and a half in power was abysmal for the U.K.: Brexit; government scandal after government scandal; a rapidly deteriorating National Health Service; a widespread cost of living crisis; a series of cruel and stupid migration policies (including one that proposes to send refugees to Rwanda).
However, there’s also widespread skepticism about newly minted PM Starmer, a lawyer and the former head of the Crown Prosecution Service. He himself is not a particularly inspiring character, and his party platform did not offer anything even close to a sweeping theory of change; the Guardian characterized it as “business-friendly”—which is always a bummer when you’re talking about a party that was founded on the backs of trade unionists.
This doesn’t necessarily mean his government won’t improve life for working people, but it does mean that it won’t be taking big swings to make Britain a more equal country.
OK so you don’t like Keir Starmer, but what about his cabinet?
I would refer you to my previous statement that I find him uninspiring, but point taken. His cabinet is decent! As many people have noted, it’s full of people who’ve had life experiences beyond going to a fancy private high school then a fancy private university then straight into politics, which describes pretty much every senior Conservative Party member. I particularly like Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, who grew up in public housing, dropped out of school at 16, and worked in trade unions before going into Labour politics. She’s also just…kind of cool? For a politician at least.
The new minister for prisons, James Timpson, has actual experience in prison reform and helping formerly incarcerated people reenter society, and has said in interviews he thinks roughly two-thirds of the U.K.’s prison population doesn’t need to be locked up.
One thing that’s overwhelmingly obvious when you look at the new government is that it is young. Starmer’s among the oldest—and he’s only 61. When compared to our failing gerontocracy on the other side of the Atlantic, it makes me supremely jealous.
Does this have anything to do with the royals?
Lol no, but they’re still a mess too.
You also mentioned France?
I did! French President Emmanuel Macron called a snap (that is, previously unplanned) legislative election, following the success of the French far-right in June’s European Parliament elections. (Overall, the centrists kept their hold on power, but right-wing parties across the European Union did better than anyone with a brain or heart would like. The European Parliament is weird, though, and doesn’t actually have a ton of power, so those elections often see a lot of anti-status-quo protest voting.) Anyway, Macron’s move was a huge gamble—one that initially looked like it wouldn’t pay off.
In the first round of voting on June 30, 33% of voters cast ballots for the Rassemblement National (RN), the nationalist, racist, formerly fringe party that has become a more-potent political force as it’s slightly tempered its neo-Nazi tendencies (that’s not a turn of phrase, by the way; its cofounder was in the Nazi SS during World War 2). All the left-wing parties united under the New Popular Front, and got 28% of the vote, while Macron’s own Ensemble party (a technocratic, centrist liberal party) got 21%. (There’s also the Republicans but I imagine you’re a bit pooped if you’ve made it this far, so we’re gonna ignore them.)
A brief aside on the rounds of voting: To win in the first round, a candidate in a particular district must get an outright majority representing at least 25% of voters registered in the district. If no one meets that threshold, the top two vote-getters, as well as any other candidate that got at least 12.5% of the vote, advance to the second round. That’s a high bar to clear when you’ve got a bunch of major parties, so the vast majority of seats went into a second round of voting.
People in France celebrate on the statue of Marianne on the Place de la Republique after the New Popular Front came in first on July 7. Photo Getty Images
Many people were braced for a right-wing win in the second round, but the beautiful blessed people of France delivered a victory to the New Popular Front—aka the socialist bloc—with 182 parliamentary seats. Ensemble even came in second (163 seats). The RN got 143 seats, and there are some highly entertaining videos of French rightwingers realizing they’d lost, if that type of schadenfreude is your thing.
Hell yeah. So what now?
That’s sort of unclear. Macron is still the president until 2027, and for now, the prime minister (that is, the senior-most member of Parliament), Gabriel Attal,remains in office. Since no party got a majority of seats, it’s unclear which party will technically be in power. It’s possible some parties in the NFP could form a coalition with Ensemble—but Ensemble has said that France Unbowed (the largest single party in the NFP) is just as bad as the RN. (The classic centrist move of equating the far-left and the far-right, which has definitely never worked out badly for anyone.)
It’s actually somewhat likely there will be total deadlock and France will have to have another election next year. On one hand, that sounds a bit exhausting, but on the other…imagine getting to re-do an election if the government wasn’t getting shit done.
