Numbers on both sides of the Channel

Britain’s Labour Party duly won the landslide that had been forecast (see my preview here), and its leader Keir Starmer has already been sworn in as the new prime minister. But he has the electoral system to thank rather more than the voters. And while that’s been a problem for a long time, it seems to be getting worse.

To illustrate, I’ve compiled the following table showing landslide victories since the early twentieth century, comparing the share of seats won with the share of the vote required to achieve it. Majorities have always been exaggerated, as happens with single-member districts, but this one is unprecedented. The previous greatest disproportion was in 2001, but this time Labour won a slightly bigger majority than that with a vote that was almost seven points lower.

Year	Party	% seats	% votes
1906	Liberal	59.3	48.9
1931	Conservative	76.4	55.0
1935	Conservative	62.8	47.8
1945	Labour	61.4	49.7
1959	Conservative	57.9	49.4
1966	Labour	57.8	48.0
1983	Conservative	61.1	42.4
1997	Labour	63.4	43.2
2001	Labour	62.5	40.7
2019	Conservative	56.2	43.6
2024	Labour	63.4	33.8

And it’s not just with the winners that there’s a problem. The Liberal Democrats, for once, didn’t suffer very badly; with 12.2% of the vote they won 72 seats, their highest total for a century and only a bit less than their proportional entitlement (81, on a quick Sainte-Laguë calculation). But Reform UK, which beat them for third place with 14.3%, won only five seats – proportionately it should have won 96.

We’ll have a look at the whole question in more detail next week, but special mention should be made of the remarkable result in Wales. With 37.0% of the Welsh vote, Labour won 27 of its 32 seats. The Welsh Nationalists with 14.8% won four seats, but the Conservatives, who comfortably outvoted them with 18.2%, won no seats at all.

Parties cannot be blamed for taking the electoral system as they find it; Labour, the Lib Dems and the Welsh Nationalists all benefited from targeting their vote in just the right places, while Reform in particular lost out through not doing so. But with Labour never having been keen on electoral reform in the first place, the chance of anything much happening in the near future seems very slim.

The big game, however, is in France, which votes tomorrow in the second round of its legislative election. I noted the other day that the number of three- or four-cornered contests was down to 130, with most candidates from both centre and left doing the right thing and withdrawing where necessary to put up a united front. More withdrawals came in on the final day, with the total of triangulaires dropping to 90, just one of which is actually a quadrangulaire.

Two-round voting, while no substitute for real proportionality, at least allows voters to focus on their final choice, so tomorrow in effect will be a referendum on whether or not the far right should be admitted to power. The unity displayed by the republican forces has not been everything that one might have hoped for – relations between Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s LFI and parts of the presidential coalition are still poisonous – but overall it’s been surprisingly good.

It’s especially worth noting how far Mélenchon, a politician I generally have very little time for, has been willing to put his tribal hatreds aside. For the last two years he has been railing against Emmanuel Macron’s reform of pensions and tightening of immigration rules, yet he has still withdrawn his own candidates to try to save the seats of the prime minister and interior minister (Élisabeth Borne and Gérald Darmanin) responsible for them.

The question is how successful it will all be: will the voters be willing to follow suit? The far right had a first-round lead in 298 of the 577 seats, so it needs to be overtaken in ten of them for it to be short of a majority. But for anything like a mainstream coalition to have a workable majority the target is more like forty or fifty.

To get an idea of the parameters, I did two calculations. In the first, I simply assumed that parties would gain or lose leads in the second round in the same proportions as they did in 2022. That gave me totals of far right 275, left 147, centre 104, centre-right 48 and three others; not an actual far-right majority, but close enough for it to be almost impossible to keep it out of power.*

That’s almost certainly at the high end of far-right prospects, for two reasons: firstly because anti-fascist unity is much greater than it was in 2022, and secondly because the arithmetic works against them; with leads in a lot more seats to start with, they have a lot more potential losses and far fewer potential offsetting gains.

So I did another calculation by simply going through each doubtful seat and assessing whether, if republican solidarity were to hold up reasonably well, there were enough votes there to overtake National Rally and its allies. On assumptions that are optimistic but not (I think) completely unrealistic, I came out with totals of far right 184, left 187, centre 150, centre-right 53 and (again) three others.

That’s probably a worst case from the far right’s point of view. But a far-right plurality is not a certainty, and it looks at least possible that the result will be a legislature where the three blocs of far right, left and centre+centre-right (which had very similar shares of the first-round vote) will be of similar size, all not very far from the 200 mark. And while you’d still bet against it, it may be that Macron will get what he most wants: a situation where National Rally and LFI between them are short of a majority.

Turnout is another unknown: in Britain it was well down, but in France’s first round it hit 66.7%, up 19 points on 2022. It usually drops a bit in the second round, and it may do so more this time, as voters, asked to support those whom they regard as their political opponents, decide to stay home instead. But it could also be that the threat of a far-right government will energise the electorate further.

Even then, finding a government with majority support will be difficult, and the prospects for 2027 are still dark. But perhaps not as bleak as they looked a few days ago.

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* My numbers throughout involve allocating most of the independents to their ideological groups even if they are not part of the official tickets – so, for example, not all of those I am calling “left” are actually part of the New Popular Front, but they can be expected to support it if need be. Similarly I count that part of the Republicans that sided with National Rally as far right.