Britain’s Conservative Party suffered sharp losses on Friday in local
elections in voting viewed as a harbinger of its grip on power, early results showed. But the scale of the setback remained unclear, with thousands of regions still to declare winners. The vote to determine control over hundreds of municipalities, across England, could be the biggest test of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s popularity before a general
election that is likely to take place in the fall of 2024 and could spell the end of 14 years of Conservative government. With more than a quarter of the results declared, the Conservatives had lost more than 220 seats early on Friday, with the main opposition
Labour Party gaining about 120 seats and the centrist Liberal
Democrats also performing well, adding roughly 60 seats. Conservative leaders, hoping to manage expectations, had predicted that an anti-incumbent mood would make some losses inevitable. Pollsters are tracking the results to assess the size of the swing away from the Conservatives and to extrapolate whether it would be enough to propel the Labour Party to victory in a general election. Mr. Sunak’s technocratic leadership has steadied his party’s nerves after a series of scandals last year forced Prime Minister , and economic turmoil then upended the government of his successor, Liz Truss, who quit after just 44 days in Downing Street. In recent weeks, the Conservative Party’s position in the polls has improved after some political successes for Mr. Sunak, including a deal with the
European Union over post-Brexit trade rules in
Northern Ireland. But his party is still trailing Labour by double digits in many polls as inflation surges and the
economy stagnates, while the country faces persistent labor unrest and a crisis in its National Health Service. At stake were around 8,000 seats for representatives in more than 200 municipalities that control local services like garbage collection and construction permitting, and a handful of mayoral positions. Voting took place across England, but not in
London or in some other parts of the country. There were early signs of trouble for the Tories on Friday. Labour seized control of two municipalities in the south of
England previously held by Conservatives: Plymouth on the southwestern coast, and Medway, east of London. Significantly, Labour also won in Stoke-on-Trent, in the middle of the country, and was victorious in a mayoral contest in Middlesbrough in the northeast — both in regions known as the “red wall,” which switched to the Tories from Labour in the last general election. Voters in these deindustrialized areas were drawn by Mr. Johnson’s upbeat messaging and promise to “Get
Brexit done” in 2019, and Labour is fighting hard to regain them, which would be a stepping stone to reclaiming power. But while it was shaping up to be a bad day for the Conservatives, it was unclear whether Labour would pick up enough of the spoils to put it on course to win a clear majority in a general election. The leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, told the
BBC that its performance was exceeding all expectations. That would deepen the woes of the Conservatives without necessarily ensuring a Labour victory next year. Ms. Sunak is hoping to secure what would be a fifth successive victory for the Conservatives in the general election, the exact timing of which he can choose but which must take place by January 2025. But to prevail he will need to retain the loyalty of many of the voters who helped Mr. Johnson achieve a landslide victory in December 2019, and the results of Thursday’s vote could provide clues about that prospect. Mr. Johnson won over many electors in the “red wall,” while many Conservative heartlands in the south of England, sometimes referred to as the “blue wall,” remained loyal in part because they were hostile to the left-wing politics of Labour’s former leader,
Jeremy Corbyn. Since then, support for the Conservatives — and for Brexit — has slumped and Labour has shifted to the center ground under Mr. Corbyn’s successor, Keir Starmer, who has put his party within sight of taking power. “There was a realignment of U.K. politics after Brexit along cultural lines,” Sara B. Hobolt, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, said before the vote. “Yet economic issues are currently overshadowing cultural issues.” But while Mr. Starmer has made steady progress, he has done so without exciting voters and he needs a good result in the local elections to keep up momentum in his race to become Britain’s next prime minister. Thursday’s elections were the first in
Britain under a new law requiring voters to show ID, a requirement that government critics say could lower turnout particularly among younger voters and some minority groups The vote is unlikely to provide a perfect barometer of national sentiment because turnout is likely to be far lower than at a general election, and parochial issues like planned housing developments and sanitation service could sway some races. There were no elections in
Scotland or Wales and people in Northern
Ireland will vote on May 18. The last time this set of elections took place was four years ago when Britain’s Parliament was still gridlocked over Brexit,
Theresa May was prime minister, and neither of the two main parties was particularly popular. This year, the Conservatives were defending more than 3,000 seats and, given their standing in the polls, were always expected to lose a significant number. How many was unclear and, in what many saw as an attempt to set the bar low, Greg Hands, the party chairman, suggested that losses of around 1,000 seats were likely. According to some analysts, losses of around 750 seats for the Conservatives would still imply a better performance than the polls suggest, while 500 would be a good result for the Tories. Labour, by contrast, would count 750 gains as a good result and would at least hope for around 450. Other small parties, including the Greens, were also taking part in the elections as were a significant number of independent candidates campaigning on local issues.