When asked about Nigel Farage, last week, Trump claimed that Farage’s party “picked up a lot of seats, more seats than he was allowed to have actually”. He was referring to the fact that Reform UK only has five MPs, less than 1% of the seats in parliament but 14.3% of the vote. Trump argued the UK’s “strange system” distorted the election result. It did.
The Liberal Democrats only won 12.2% of the vote and have 72 seats. Labour with 33.7% of the vote, has 403 seats.
The first past the post system has disenfranchised voters. This matters, even for those who want to deny power to those on the “right”. For democracy to survive, election outcomes must reflect the will of the people.
In the 2015, UK General Election, UKIP won 12.6% of the vote and one seat in parliament, a fact David Cameron used to mock UKIP leader Nigel Farage. The following year, in the Brexit referendum, the joke was on Cameron, as Farage led the Leave campaign to victory.
The efforts by liberal elites to keep those on the “right” from any substantive involvement in government are detrimental to political stability. They are not marginalising one person: Farage in the UK, Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, or Trump in the US. They are treating with contempt their millions of voters.
These voters do not disappear because their leaders are prevented from exercising power. They increase in number. In many European countries, governing coalitions are excluding the right-wing parties that won the most votes. Yesterday, Herbert Kickl’s Freedom party, won the most seats in the Austrian election. The immediate response of the liberal parties was to refuse to work with him. This undermines the principle of representative democracy and democracy itself.
If voting does not influence government policy, what is the point in voting? The August riots in the UK followed the landslide victory of a party for whom the majority of the electorate did not vote.
The appeal of the “right” in the UK, Europe and the US has a number of causes, the most obvious being concern over large-scale immigration. In a democracy, voters have a right to object to immigration, just as they have the right to object to any government policy. Parties present a manifesto and voters decide if they support those policies. No UK or European government has campaigned on a pro-large scale immigration platform, therefore in failing to address this issue and by acquiescing in the continuation of large scale immigration, these governments have exceeded their democratic mandate.
To retain legitimacy and preserve democracy, the liberal elite must govern with respect for the views of those with whom they disagree.
Resisting the views of extremists is necessary. Marginalising the views of millions of voters in a democracy is unsustainable. If it persists, the liberals will, ironically, only succeed in hastening the end of democracy. The “right” will be there to fill the void.
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