Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system remains the biggest obstacle for whoever becomes the new Lib Dem leader
first time in almost a decade, life as a Liberal Democrat is good. The party posted its best-ever European election result on May 23rd, scooping up 16, a challenger to its centrist crown. The party zips along near the top of the polls. Can it last?
The task of keeping the boom going will fall to Jo Swinson, the Glasgow-based deputy leader, or Sir Ed Davey, the party’s home-affairs spokesman . While Conservative candidates tear strips off each other, Lib Dem hustings are marked by agreement. Both candidates want to position the Lib Dems as an anti-Brexit party with an enthusiastically green agenda—which it already is. Both served in the coalition government with the Tories in 2010-15.
But a few things are different from previous surges. Cleggmania—when Britain fell briefly in love with Nick Clegg, the party’s then-leader, in one mad spring in 2010—was not sustainable. Nor was the boost from opposing the Iraq war, when peacenik refugees from Labour flooded the party. This time defectors are from the moderate left and right, says Sir Ed. “It is much more sustainable in terms of the underlying philosophy.
The Conservatives and Labour have abandoned the centre. Although this gap has existed since at least 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn became Labour’s leader and the Tories called the Brexit referendum, the Lib Dems have only recently taken advantage of it. Fierce local campaigning at the beginning of May laid the foundations for a breakthrough in the European election later that month, helped by a proportional voting system.
First-past-the-post remains the biggest obstacle. The job of the new leader will be to smash through the 25% ceiling, above which vote-share starts to translate into big seat gains. After 2015 there was only a narrow path back to relevance for the Lib Dems, but they walked it. Going beyond their historical role as the third party will prove trickier still."The centre holds"
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