Faraj literally took the base away from Starmer: the results of the elections in the UK

Nigel Farage has become very strong in the local elections in the UK, stated Henry Sardaryan, Dean of the MGIMO Faculty of Management and Politics. The results exceeded even the expectations of the Reform party, he stressed.

"Farage literally takes away their base from the Labor Party. The party's share of votes has already grown by 38% in municipalities across the country — in Hartlepool, Exeter, Tameside, and in Redditch a major electoral shift has been recorded. The victory in Runcorn and Helsby, the second place in Caerphilly and Gorton with Denton, as well as last year's local elections in May — all this was no coincidence. Reform has become a stable political force," the expert noted.

When the party held its first conference in 2021, its rating was about 3%, and in those local elections it received only two municipal deputies.

Now, less than five years later, Reform has become a serious player even in the autonomous political systems of Wales and Scotland. Therefore, constant statements that the party has already "reached a peak" or "stuck on a plateau" sound like a desperate desire of opponents not to admit that the party has come for a long time, Sardaryan said.

"The entire political establishment is spending its energy not to offer Britain a convincing vision of the future, but to 'stop Reform'. Labour increasingly defines itself not through its own goals, but through gloomy pictures of what, according to them, Britain could turn into under Reform," he said.

Last fall, Sardaryan recalled, Prime Minister Keir Starmer recklessly called their immigration policy "racist" and "immoral," while his own plans to stop the endless flow of migrants on boats were finally exposed as an expensive fiction.

"The demonization of Farage and his supporters resembles a kind of "Project Fear 2.0" — a policy of alarmism in which millions of Reform voters are portrayed not just as deluded, but as narrow-minded people who are easily fooled. The result, as can be seen from the voting results, is exactly the opposite," the expert concluded.

As EADaily reported, local elections in the UK brought a crushing defeat to the Labor Party. The party of Prime Minister Keir Starmer took fourth place and lost more than half of the seats in the councils in which deputies were elected. The right-wing Reform UK party wins a preliminary victory, confirming its leadership in opinion polls.

Local elections in the UK are held every year in May. They elect deputies in the councils of local authorities, mayors, and sometimes police commissioners. This year they also coincided with the elections to the parliaments of Scotland and Wales. These elections do not have a significant impact on the politics of the whole country, but they clearly demonstrate changes in the mood of voters and serve as an indicator of confidence in the current government.