Britain’s Labour party swept to a stunning victory Friday, almost matching Tony Blair’s record landslide in 1997.
The world is watching, open-mouthed: what happened there? Keir Starmer’s victory — and the collapse of the post-Brexit Tory coalition — rippled across the Atlantic as a rare breakthrough for traditional centrist politics in yet another season of populist upheaval.
At first glance, the outcome appears to stand in stark contrast to the elections underway in the United States, where President Joe Biden is straining to stabilize his candidacy against Donald Trump, and France, where President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist faction is polling in third place against far-left and far-right rivals.
Third Way, a centrist American think tank, composed a memo analyzing the election results as a “victory for ruthless competence,” holding up Starmer’s campaign as a model for other center-left leaders confronting right-wing nationalism.
For this is not a story of Britain lurching to the left. This is a story about something deeper — about broken promises and broken trust; about failing public services and household bills you can’t pay; a collective lust for change. It’s about a deep disillusionment with politics.
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