Political tradeoffs

Traditional political parties depend on compromise. That is bad news for them in uncompromising times

Imagine an election in which a party that did not even exist less than two months before gains one-third of the vote, pushing not only the governing party into fifth place but also the main opposition party into third. Actually, don’t — there is no need, because this is exactly what happened in the elections for the European Parliament in the UK. These elections were not even supposed to take place, since the country should have left the EU on 29th March. Yet they did happen, and they may well have changed the British political landscape for years to come.

The European elections in the UK have traditionally been a very low-key affair. Neither the voters nor the media used to pay all that much attention to it. Turnout has always been much lower ( never more than about 38%) than that of general parliamentary elections ( typically 60% -70% in recent times). Even the main political parties were at best lukewarm about it. For the British, politics was a matter for Westminster, not Brussels or Strasbourg.

Not so this time. Weeks before election day, the polls spelled disaster for the governing Conservatives and, remarkably, also for the Labour opposition, and predicted victory for Nigel Farage’s…