Guest post by Adrian Beaumont, who joins us from time to time to provide commentary on elections internationally. Adrian is a paid election analyst for The Conversation. His work for The Conversation can be found here.
On Sunday European elections were held in Romania, Portugal and Poland. At the Romanian presidential runoff election, the pro-Western centrist Nicușor Dan, who is a mathematician and the current mayor of Bucharest, defeated the far-right George Simion by a 53.6-46.4 margin. Dan had qualified for the runoff with 21.0% in the May 4 first round, edging out another pro-Western candidate who won 20.1%, while Simion dominated with 41.0%. This election was rerun after the first election in December was annulled by the courts owing to concerns about Russian influence.
Portugal used proportional representation by region to elect its 230 MPs. Four seats are reserved for expatriate Portuguese and won’t be decided until later. This was a snap election called after the conservative AD lost a confidence vote. The AD won 89 seats (up nine since the March 2024 election), the centre-left Socialists 58 (down 20), the far-right Chega 58 (up eight), the economically right Liberal Initiative nine (up one) and the Greens six (up two). This was the Socialists’ worst seat share since 1987.
Sunday was the first round of the Polish presidential election, with the runoff on June 1. Rafał Trzaskowski, the candidate of the centrist and pro-Western Civic Coalition, won 31.4%, followed by Karol Nawrocki, the candidate of the economically left but socially conservative Law and Justice (PiS) on 29.5% and the far-right Confederation on 14.8%. In runoff polling, Trzaskowski led in a first round exit poll by 47-38 with 15% undecided, and he has led in most runoff polls. A win for Trzaskowski would give the Civic Coalition and its allies, who have a parliamentary majority, control of government, with PiS currently holding the presidency.
In case you missed it (I posted this on the day of the Australian election), I had a results wrap of the May 1 UK local elections. The far-right Reform won 30% of the BBC’s Projected National Share, with Labour on 20%, the Liberal Democrats on 17% and the Conservatives on 15%. Since these elections, Reform has surged in national polls. In the Election Maps UK poll aggregate, Reform now has 29.1%, Labour 23.3%, the Conservatives 18.6%, the Lib Dems 14.2% and the Greens 8.9%.
The 140 Albanian parliamentary seats were elected using PR at the May 11 election. The governing Socialists won a fourth successive term, with 83 seats (up nine since 2021), the conservative Democrats won 50 seats (down 13) and others seven (up four). The election was marred by widespread misuse of public resources and institutional power by the Socialists.
Canada and South Korea
In my May 1 wrap of the April 28 Canadian federal election, I said the centre-left Liberals won 169 of the 343 seats, the Conservatives 144, the separatist left-wing Quebec Bloc (BQ) 22, the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) seven and the Greens one. It appears that rechecking put the Liberals ahead in a seat the Conservatives led, and the BQ ahead in a seat the Liberals led.
However, a recount in the BQ-led seat reversed the result, with the Liberals winning by just one vote, overturning a 44-vote BQ lead. A recount in a seat the Liberals won narrowly against the Conservatives confirmed the initial result. Results of two recounts are still pending, one with a narrow Liberal margin over the Conservatives and the other with a narrow Conservative margin over the Liberals. If remaining recounts confirm the initial results, the overall seat totals will be 170 Liberals, 143 Conservatives, 22 BQ, seven NDP and one Green, putting the Liberals two seats short of a majority.
The South Korean presidential election will be held on June 3, about two years earlier than scheduled after the previous president of the right-wing People Power Party (PPP) was impeached then removed from office. The president is elected by first past the post. Polls have the centre-left Democratic nominee, Lee Jae-myung, leading PPP’s Kim Moon-soo by between seven and 22 points. Democrats have a large parliamentary majority, so a win for Lee would give them control of government until the next parliamentary elections in 2028.
Progressive nationalism not a
Universal movement in Europe or old blighty yet – a 2-2 draw.
The Tories in Britain like the centre-right Republicans in France flirted with collaboration with the hard right, giving them social licence but risking electoral irrelevance as a result.
Instructive for the coalition down under?
Coalition finished for now. And at least 2 more elections.
Susssan will get knifed very soon so that the Nats and right wing libs can hang out in the party room again, keep their nuclear fantasy, drop net zero and end social liberalism.
A new moderate party may emerge?
I wonder if the Trump factor played ever so slightly into Romania’s election.
It was certainly not the result I was expecting.
So maybe Trump is doing some good all around the world – unintentionally!
South Korea is currently on their 3rd acting President since the attempted coup last year but one acting president got two goes at it too. This will mean there will be a fifth transfer of power in 12 months after the election.
Random fact: Nicusor Dan got a perfect score in the International Mathematics Olympiad, held in Canberra in 1988. (I had a go at qualifying for this myself but didn’t make the cut for the Australian team). We lived in Canberra at the time and hosted a few of the teams for social events but I don’t think Romania was one of them, so I don’t think I can say that the future Romanian President has been to our house :-).
Great news for Romania. NATO’s candidate has won, sparing any need to annul the results a second time and hold a third election.
“defeated the far-right George Simion by a 53.6-46.4 margin.”
I know the media are copying one another and saying this, but I thought George Simion was actually a left-wing nationalist, of the kind you sometimes get in Russia and other Slavic and ex-Communist nations.
In any case, he is virulently anti-Ukraine support, and has as firm ally the older guy who ran in the 2024 election 1st round funded by Russia, that got annulled (leading to this re-run).
In terms of Ukraine, it doesn’t make much difference which of the leading parties win in Poland or Portugal.
Portugal is a remote and relatively weak supporter, so it barely matters.
And both big parties in Poland are staunchly pro-Ukraine. If anything, the party sometimes accused of being ‘far right’ – the PiS – is notably the most strident in its criticism of Russia.
Twas always so, but doubly so since their long-term party leader (who was PM at the time) had the tragedy of his twin brother (President at the time) killed in a plane crash over Russia while on a government trip.
Geoffrey Epstein 8.55pm
You suggesting Romania should have overlooked the severe Russian interference that came to light AFTER the election took place in Romania?? – which was the first round only, remember, for what that matters – i.e. no-one was elected yet.
Or was your post said without irony?
“The Tories in Britain like the centre-right Republicans in France flirted with collaboration with the hard right,. . .”
When?
In the 3 weeks since the English local elections several Reform candidates who won seats have already resigned their seats which will lead to a number of by-elections in the coming weeks at an average cost of approx £ 20,000 each.
There will be a few more once the employment status of some has been determined as apparently some have jobs working for the council they were elected to which is impermissible. They will have to decide whether to resign their seats or their jobs.
And a few have left the Reform group of the councils on which they do still sit.
0 = number of boats Reform Councils have stopped.
“0 = number of boats Reform Councils have stopped.”
News to me that local councils had the job of stopping the boats.
To be frank, the amount of people coming into the UK this way (even if it is a tiny minority of immigrants coming, it’s still a large number of people) – and the amount who die in the attempt – I don’t feel like joking about it. It’s a serious issue that needs addressing.
Criminals are conning most of these people who then take the risk of their lives. . . literally. And I’m quite sure crossing the English channel wasn’t the worst part of their journey for many of them.
I don’t feel any animosity to any of them, even those who are only coming for betterment, unless they are coming with the readiness to commit crimes when things don’t go their way. It’s up to us as a nation to find the solutions to this land invasion taking place – for me, many of the issues can be summarised by the phrase “severe lack of integration”, it’s not just a numbers thing though I think we need to halt the numbers almost completely, temporarily, to get a grip and put in place the systems and infrastructure for integration.
At the moment, any form of ‘system’ is simply completely overwhelmed by sheer numbers – and probably a good deal of bureaucratic incompetence.
“News to me that local councils had the job of stopping the boats.”
They don’t yet Reform campaigned on it.
“They don’t yet Reform campaigned on it.”
Undoubtedly that was the centrepiece of their campaigns – not. Anyway, they obviously did something right in their marketing to win 650+ council seats from a standing start.
I’m not a ‘Reformer’ but I do think they deserve a bit more respect – simply because they speak to the current needs and aspirations of the people far more than anyone else right now (going purely by the data, i.e. opinion polls), maybe other parties need to understand why even if they do sound a bit simplistic at the moment in their policy prescriptions. They will sort out the policy properly in due course and if other parties wait until then to directly address the same issues they will have left it too late.
Lib Dems dismissing Reform as the butt of jokes and subject of condescension could work well enough to take maybe half of the remaining Tory seats (if they continue their current demise through to destruction) whilst losing fewer than half that number to Reform in seats they hold – perhaps that will be the very comfortable position they aspire to. But that’s not the strategy of a party that truly has a vision for the WHOLE country, it’s the strategy of a ‘permanent opposition’ who, at the most, want leverage in a minority government rather than having the big ideas that will drive the country forward.
@ChrisC I’ve no idea of your politics but you sound like a Lib Dem 🙂
Labour, however, are being forced to take notice of these voters’ wishes more as Reform speak directly to their (working class, not metropolitan) heartlands. Though they are not showing a great deal more respect for them at the moment other than focusing a bit more on immigration.
Tories are struggling to get in the news or just be heard at all. They are trying but they need a stronger strategy pretty quickly to remain relevant and be in a position to take advantage of major slip-ups by Reform or Labour. Until they do this, they will fail to wrest back the initiative from the Lib Dems in rural Southern Britain, as Lib Dems are brilliant at hyper-local politics and also fly just enough below the national radar to get any proper scrutiny from anyone that might otherwise take them down a few pegs.
Greens appear to finally be here to stay, having taken a few leaves out of the Lib Dems’ book on how to win local campaigns. Sooner or later, they may collide with reality as their ultra-socialist members in e.g. Lewisham in London or somewhere, bump up against their country colleagues in Suffolk saying completely different things. The exposure of such hypocrisy was why the Lib Dems got so roundly rejected at the 2015 GE after a period of coalition government when they finally had to face up to these contradictions and disappoint nearly all of those who had voted for them in disparate areas (esp inner city voters, who they’ve not made good inroads with since).
Striking to see latest polls in ultra-socialist London and Scotland showing Reform have moved from 5th to 2nd place, albeit a long way behind the respective leading party in both cases.
Since the 1 May local elections, every GB/UK poll conducted wholly after the event shows Reform leading, with a range of 3-13% leads. I would make a crude guess of an average lead of 7.5% over Labour, with Conservatives about 4.5% behind Labour and LDs about 3% behind Conservatives, so averaging (GB) something like this:
Reform 30% (+15% or x2 i.e. they have 200% of their 2024 support)
Labour 22.5% (-12% or x0.65 i.e. they retain 65% of their 2024 voters)
Conservative 18% (-6.5% or x0.74 i.e. they retain 74% of their 2024 voters)
Lib Dem 15% (+2.5% or x1.2 i.e. they have 120% of their 2024 support)
Green 9.5% (+2.5% or x1.38 i.e they have 138% of their 2024 support)
I have not seen any MRP polls since 1 May but the above would be at least bordering on giving Reform a majority government.
Obviously the next election is still, AFAWK, 3-4 years away and the SDP remains as a salutary lesson of what can happen to insurgent parties who take the lead in polls, over the course of several years.
I tend to think that some sort of alliance at least, between Reform and Conservative is more likely than it was – in which case the ‘Tory wets’ would revolt and either go it alone or formally join the Lib Dems, perhaps in exchange for a few policies.
But early days – anything can happen and anyone wishing Keir Starmer’s super-majority government away any time soon is dreaming.
Starmer is nothing like Blair unfortunately but he will find, like Blair, that his backbenchers will give him a lot of trouble on certain issues but largely stay on the Labour team when push comes to shove, as there is nowhere else realistic that they can go – unless Corbyn and his fellow independents do a merge with equally awful Galloway’s Workers Party and establish a bit of firm ground in strong muslim areas that the hardest left Labour MPs might be tempted to join.
What you are unlikely to see that you saw in Blair’s early government years, is MPs defecting from Tories to Labour. The 2025 Parliamentary Labour Party is a much harder left Labour party than the one a quarter of a century ago (the grassroots always were pretty left still but they become a broader camp for a while), that even the the most left-wing of Tories is unlikely to consider joining however much they might despise their party’s rightwing let alone Reform.
Meanwhile, if the economy makes a half-decent recovery in the next couple of years in spite or because of Starmer’s efforts, then Labour probably have a decent chance of winning another election depending how split the opposition is.
Survation (Westminster not Holyrood) poll of Scotland 2-5 May 2025 (changes from GE 2024):
Lab 19% (-16.3)
SNP 32% (+2.0)
Con 11% (-1.7)
LD 11% (+1.3)
Ref 21% (+14)
Green 5% (+1.2)
I haven’t a clue what that looks like in terms of seat count beyond it being a sizeable majority of Scottish seats for SNP and LDs holding onto/marginally growing to 1/2 a dozen. SNP probably down in N-E Scotland but whether Con hold their seats or Reform leapfrog both of them there I don’t know. SNP and Reform votes would be much more evenly spread than the other parties – great for SNP when in such a clear 1st place on VI, but Reform might end up not winning many if any of the 57 seats available (though 0 seats feels like a stretch).
Find Out Now poll of London 4-8 May 2025 (changes from GE 2024):
Lab 30% (-13.0)
Con 17% (-3.6)
LD 16% (+5.0)
Green 15% (+5.0)
Ref 19% (+10.3)
Labour would still win a majority of seats on these numbers, but Cons might make net gains in Outer London. Reform would win a handful, and LD should be winning the wealthier seats that they did quite well in in 2019 GE as well as any obvious close marginals with Cons. Greens might take a ‘wildcard’ seat from Labour somewhere.
Reform absolutely did use ‘stop the boats’ as the centre piece of their campaign.
Even in inland areas!
They may be speaking to people but it’s based on lies and misrepresentations.
In the Kent County Council area they promised a return to weekly refuse collection. Refuse collection isn’t a Kent County Council service so isn’t something they have control ov
And no I’m not a LibDem. Never been so insulted.