With the Conservative British Prime Minister setting a date for a long-awaited vote in early summer and the United States holding a crucial presidential election in the coming months, what happened in 2016 when Britons voted to leave the European Union and Americans elected Donald J. Trump is now happening again.
Political prognosticators might be tempted to study the results of the July 4th UK general election to predict the outcome of the November 5th US election. After all, Britain’s shock decision to leave the EU in 2016 came to be seen as a harbinger of Trump’s surprise victory later that year.
But this time, past may not be a sign. British voters are expected to opt for the opposition Labour Party in a landslide victory over the embattled Conservative Party, while in the United States, Democratic President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is locked in a tough battle with President Trump and the Republicans.
“We’re in a very different situation politically right now than in the United States,” said Robert Ford, a politics professor at the University of Manchester. The Conservative Party has been in power for 14 years, Brexit has faded as a political issue and Britain has no equivalent to Trump.
Ben Ansell, professor of comparative democratic institutions at the University of Oxford, said that to the extent there were common themes on both sides of the Atlantic, “it’s a really bad thing to be an incumbent.”
By all accounts, Chancellor Rishi Sunak decided to call an election months early because he doesn’t expect Britain’s economic situation to improve between now and the fall. Analysts say Sunak, who is trailing Labour in the opinion polls by more than 20 percentage points, is betting that the Conservatives can limit their losses by facing voters now.
There is little evidence that the US political calendar influenced Sunak’s decision, but holding the election on July 4th has the side benefit of avoiding an election overlap. Waiting until mid-November, as political oddsmakers predicted, would have risked being caught in the aftermath of the US election result.
Political analysts were already debating whether a Trump victory would benefit the Conservative or Labour party, with some speculating that Sunak might use the chaos that would be caused by another Trump presidency as a reason to stay in the Conservative party, who might be able to get on better with Trump than Labour leader Keir Starmer.
But that is no longer relevant: before the Republican and Democrats meet their conferences, Britain will very likely have a new parliament and a new prime minister.
Still, analysts say the British election could offer lessons for the United States, where the two countries are politically aligned on many issues, including fears about immigration, anger over inflation and divisions over social and cultural issues.
“Imagine if the Conservative party collapsed like in Canada in 1993,” Ansell said, referring to the federal election in which the incumbent Progressive Conservative party was nearly annihilated by the Liberal party and ousted as Canada’s leading right-wing party by the Reform Party.
Britain’s Conservative Party faces a milder threat from Reform UK, a party co-founded by anti-immigration populist Nigel Farage. The latest YouGov poll puts Reform on 14% support, the Conservatives on 22% and Labour on 44%.
Prof Ansell said the Reform Party’s surge “may be a sign of a resurgence of populism in the UK, and a harbinger of what could happen in the US this autumn”.
Conversely, if Britain’s centre-left parties – Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens – win significant seats, it might reassure Democrats that better-than-expected results in the midterm and by-elections are not a fluke but part of a larger global shift, he said.
Some right-wing critics blame the Conservative party’s decline on a move away from the economic nationalism that drove the Brexit vote and then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party’s victory in 2019. They say the party’s embrace of liberal, free-market policies has put it out of step with Trump’s MAGA movement and right-wing movements in Italy and the Netherlands.
“Whatever you think of Trump, he is unstable and a danger to democracy, but if you look at the opinion polls he is doing much better than the Conservatives,” said Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics at the University of Kent.
One difference, of course, is that Trump has been out of power for almost four years, which means that, unlike the Conservatives, he is not being blamed for the cost of living crisis, nor for the failure to control the border, with Biden in the US and Sunak in the UK.
As he rallies Conservative voters, Mr Sunak has used an anti-immigration rallying cry reminiscent of the Brexit campaigners in 2016. He has spent much of his time as prime minister promoting a plan to put asylum seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda – a costly, highly criticised scheme that has never been put on the market – and which has some similarities to Mr Trump’s border wall.
“This was a kind of Trump moment for us,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to Washington, “but given the legacy Keir Starmer will inherit, we can’t rule out someone on the right of the Conservative party taking advantage of a weak Labour government to return to power in four or five years’ time.”
Despite its symbolic importance, Brexit is barely an issue in 2024. Analysts say this reflects voter fatigue, the Conservative Party’s recognition that leaving the EU has had a negative impact on the British economy and a perception that Britain will not rejoin the EU anytime soon.
“Both parties are not allowed to talk about Brexit because they are afraid of what will happen if they let the dog off the leash,” said Chris Patten, a former Hong Kong governor and Conservative politician who led the Conservative party in 1992 when it overcame a deficit in the opinion polls to lead a surprise victory over Labour.
Mr Patten said he was sceptical the Conservatives could get it done this time, given the depth of voter discontent with the party and the differences between Mr Sunak and John Major, the 1992 chancellor.
That feeling of helplessness appears to be shared by Conservative lawmakers, with nearly 80 choosing not to stand for their seats, including former leadership contestant Michael Gove, who has been a central figure in almost every Conservative-led government since David Cameron came to power in 2010.
Frank Luntz, a US political strategist who has lived and worked in Britain, said the British and US elections were driven not by ideological battles but by widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo.
“We live in a very different world than we did in 2016,” Luntz said, “but the common thread on both sides of the Atlantic is a sentiment that can be summed up in one word: enough is enough.”
