Britain as a Warning Signal for Europe’s Establishment

Nigel Farage, Leader of Reform UK tries his hand at clay pigeon shooting at Catton Hall. Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Britain as a Warning Signal for Europe’s Establishment

As Reform UK upends Britain’s old political order, Europe’s established parties face a warning: voters who feel ignored on migration, security and economic decline are no longer afraid to punish the system itself.

Britain’s established party system is facing total collapse. The reasons are home-grown. For too long, public anger over the country’s many problems, especially its economic and migration policies, has been ignored.

For too long, the establishment tried to use hardball tactics and increasingly restrictive laws to push back free speech at every level, from the street to the internet, and to brand government critics as extremists. The country that once invented Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park and was regarded as the cradle of liberalism has become exceptionally adept at devising ever more surveillance laws, hate-speech offences and rigorous state punishment for non-conforming behavior.

For too long, it was also assumed that new right-wing political movements could be brought under control through defamation and exclusion. The result was recently visible in regional elections that served as harbingers of collapse. They showed how political arrangements, some of them centuries old, can be overrun when they fail to take protest movements seriously until those movements become real competition.

You might be interested Britain’s Insurgent Parties Shake Up the Political Landscape

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

“Nothing in the world is so powerful as an idea whose time has come”, the French writer Victor Hugo once said. The English, at any rate, are now demanding their country back, and the tipping point has long since been reached. Other European governments, which are also fighting with little success against the rise of right-wing political currents, would do well to watch closely how breathtakingly fast power can slip through their fingers when ruling parties mistake yesterday’s left-liberal consensus for the real mood of the country.

The problem with long-lived institutions and systems is usually that they come to see their own existence as a kind of God-given certainty. As a result, many develop a certain arrogance of power and a belief that everything will simply go on forever. Of course, they know highs and lows, but in the end they always count on a kind of protected status, while any warning that things could go fundamentally wrong is treated almost as lèse-majesté. Not us. We have been here forever.

Politically, such a misconception is dangerous. Parties come and go. Some die.

Britain is now showing how a party system that divided the country for centuries between Labour and the Tories is being pulverized by new political forces.

Labour Loses Its Grip on Wales

In the local elections on 7 May 2026, the regional party Plaid Cymru ended Labour’s century-long dominance in Wales, more than doubling its seats in one stroke with a gain of 21, while the former workers’ party lost 20 of its 29 seats. It was a political massacre. Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s new alliance, contested an election in Wales for the first time, immediately benefited from the agreed expansion of the regional parliament from 60 to 96 seats and won 34 seats from a standing start, becoming the strongest opposition party with 29.3% of the vote.

The Conservatives in Wales have long since become also-rans and managed to almost halve their already meagre presence from 13 seats to seven, while splinter parties such as the Greens in Wales doubled their representation from two seats to four.

In short, Labour has been replaced by Plaid Cymru, which offers a far more credible voice for a self-confident, social and autonomous Wales and scored particularly well with young, left-wing and female voters. On the other side of the political spectrum, the Conservatives have ceded their claim to being a people’s party to Reform UK, which was better able to reach older, male and nationally minded voters in Wales.

You might be interested Labour and Conservatives Face Collapse in Wales as Political Map Fractures

Reform UK Becomes the New Protest Machine

Overall, the governing Labour Party under Starmer lost 1,496 seats in the current local elections, while Reform UK gained 1,451. The Tories lost “only” 563 seats simply because they were already on the floor. The shift becomes clearer in percentage terms: Labour suffered a loss of 58% and the Conservatives 41%. Reform UK, which previously held just two seats, recorded a gain of 72,000% and secured control of 14 councils, while Labour lost 38 councils.

Similar tectonic shifts may await other European countries, and possibly Germany first, if the parties that for years saw themselves as the natural occupants of power continue to ignore voters’ wishes on migration policy, as well as fears over energy supply and job losses.

Again and again, migration policy, internal security and steadily growing anger over the bureaucratic EU are clearly the main reasons why voters in Europe no longer trust the establishment and are turning to right-wing and national movements and parties. Years of stigmatization as supposed extremists, far-right radicals or even Nazis no longer deter them, but are answered with defiance.

Migration Turns Into the Central Fault Line

When the political activist Tommy Robinson mobilized again last weekend, tens of thousands of people protested under the slogan “Unite the Kingdom” against the Labour government’s migration policy. They were a broad range of entirely ordinary English people, speaking out in a sea of flags and demanding a different policy from the one that allows 200,000 illegal migrants to arrive in England each year in small boats.

Nigel Farage not only successfully pushed the country towards Brexit. With Reform UK, he is now winning support above all by announcing the “Operation Restoring Justice” program, which is intended to seal the borders and promises deportations on a large scale, in other words the remigration of those whom the average Englishman no longer wants in the country.

Another force under the name Restore Britain is also taking sharp aim at migration policy in England. The former Reform UK politician Rupert Lowe has built credibility among the public by forcing an investigation into the grooming scandals and a hearing for victims, an unresolved scandal that numerous established politicians spent years trying to sweep under the carpet.

You might be interested Britain’s Politics Reshaped?

A European Pattern

Migration, internal security and self-assertion towards Brussels were also the issues that brought Meloni to power in Italy, kept Viktor Orban in office for so long and allowed the Rassemblement National in France to grow into the strongest force. Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella could both win presidential elections with polling figures of up to 38%. Where right-wing parties can field two candidates, others no longer have even one convincing contender.

Austria, too, spent decades comfortably dividing the country down to the last caretaker’s post in a kind of two-party state between the conservatives of the ÖVP and the socialists of the SPÖ. Herbert Kickl and his Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) now stand at almost 37% in the polls.

The former party giants, ÖVP and SPÖ, even had to pull together with a third party, NEOS, to scrape together an anti-FPÖ alliance at federal level, while the FPÖ is steadily but surely expanding its status as a people’s party in the individual states and working towards appointing the next chancellor with its own majority if nobody is willing to form a coalition with it.

Anti-Right Alliances Are Running Out of Road

The anti-right alliances in Austria, France and Germany look like a final act of resistance, but also like a refusal to accept that tectonic political plates are shifting. Instead of responding and turning to the issues that move people, parties prefer to form cobbled-together coalitions with almost anyone, whose only purpose is to prevent a victory for the right.

The result is that all those involved give up their core issues and remain stuck in a politics of paralysis, because the opinions within the coalition are so far apart that no major reforms can be agreed. In France, parliament is blocking itself. In Germany, stagnation prevails even as the country, now in its fourth year of recession and burdened by disastrous energy policy, is racing towards a wall, while the costs of illegal migration are exploding and becoming visible in street crime that can no longer be concealed.

German voters are responding to the federal stalemate with exceptionally strong polling numbers for the Alternative for Germany (AfD). The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) together manage only 22%, while the AfD, currently on 29%, is approaching the 30% threshold. It will not take much longer.

Germany’s Establishment Faces Its Own Warning

Germany also faces further local and state elections later this year. In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is currently polling at 42%. One more percentage point and it would be enough to govern alone in parliament. Across the east, the AfD has long since replaced the CDU as the people’s party and is leading in some places with figures above 40%.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD), meanwhile, has been replaced by a strengthened radical left, while splinter parties such as the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) and the Greens are further fragmenting the left and far-left camp. In the end, perhaps even in Saxony-Anhalt, only an alliance between the CDU and left-wing extremists will prevent an AfD government, or perhaps nothing will.

The belief that the right-wing movement can be stopped by stigmatizing the party and its voters is reaching its end in the face of political reality in numerous countries. England should be a warning above all to the German establishment of how quickly it can happen.

“The left is over”, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz proclaimed during the election campaign. Today, it appears that the Christian Democrats may be finished instead, along with the Social Democrats, if both continue as they are. The two major people’s parties that shaped post-war Germany in alternating governments, and sometimes together, could then suffer the fate of becoming mere junior partners in coalitions after previously setting the tone. The SPD has already reached that humiliating state and must fight even to achieve double-digit results.

While the CDU is being overtaken from the right by the AfD, it has long since been replaced as the people’s party in eastern Germany. The Social Democrats are suffering the same fate from the left through the Greens and far-left parties, but also through the AfD, which is taking working-class voters away from them. Today, both parties must fear not only for their status as people’s parties, but for their political relevance as a whole, because voters are abandoning them.

You might be interested Record Rape Numbers in Germany Revive Taboo Migration Debate

The People Want Their Countries Back

It is not only the English who want their country back, but also the Danes, Swedes, French, Austrians and Germans. Denmark has understood this. There, the Social Democratic prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, is now pursuing a migration policy for which Germany’s Social Democrats would indignantly call her a Nazi.

Reform UK is the blueprint for all those countries that still believe they can govern indefinitely against the wishes of the people. At some point, even the most patient people take to the streets.