This Trump supporter helped crush the UK’s Conservative Party

On Friday, Farage was in London celebrating. His upstart party Reform UK had won more than 14% of the total vote in Britain’s election last Thursday on an anti-immigration platform. The 60-year-old, who built a career protesting against the establishment, will now sit in Parliament alongside four other Reform UK lawmakers—his first victory for Parliament in eight attempts.

His six-week campaign helped ensure that the Conservative Party lost scores of additional seats, suffering its worst defeat in its nearly 200-year history, and giving an even bigger majority to the center-left Labour Party, which was widely expected to win. Former U.S. President Trump quickly sent a message of congratulations to Farage: “Nigel is a man who truly loves his Country!”

For Farage, a cigarette-smoking populist, the vote establishes a bridgehead in Britain’s Parliament from which he can launch the next stage of his strategy—professionalize his protest campaign to try a takeover of the right-wing of British politics and become prime minister when elections are next held by 2029. His campaign saw millions of mostly working-class voters switch from Tory to Reform UK.

“Let the Conservative Party tear themselves apart as they are going to do in opposition,” he said Friday.

Farage’s strong showing in the election comes at a time when far-right parties across much of Europe are making big gains, especially in France, where Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won the first round of parliamentary elections last weekend, taking about a third of the vote, and hopes for a similar result in the second round on Sunday. Germany’s AfD recently came in second place in European elections, beating the governing center-left party.

Reform UK’s immediate effect will be to fuel what will likely prove a bruising battle within the Conservative Party and more broadly on the right-wing of British politics over how best to challenge the left. The Tories are embarking on a leadership contest to replace outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who has said he will stay on as party leader for a few months until a successor can be picked. The Tories face a difficult choice: whether to embrace Farage, try to compete against him and woo his supporters by promising a harder line on immigration, or reject him outright and try to appeal to centrist voters.

“It’s really a nightmare scenario for the Conservatives,” said Matthew Goodwin, a politics professor at the University of Kent. “It’s not at all clear how they get out of this or whether they can survive as a viable political party.”

Others think Reform will have a more difficult time shaking things up. In places such as France, Germany and Italy, parliaments have proportional representation that gives a bigger voice to smaller parties, making it easier for populist insurgencies to gain momentum, said Tony Travers, a political professor at the London School of Economics. The U.K.’s system gives seats only to the outright winners in each district, called “first past the post.” That means Reform may have won 14% of the vote but got just five seats out of 650.

There is another, crucial difference, Travers said: Both the National Rally in France and AfD have been decades in the making. Farage, however, has had a tendency to explode onto the British political scene and then retreat. Farage is like a “comet that occasionally appears in the sky. It doesn’t stay in the sky all the time, whereas National Rally is there permanently as a feature of French politics,” said Travers. Even as the U.K. campaign started in late May, Farage took a few days to decide whether he would take part or focus on Trump’s campaign instead.

Farage didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

The British election, on its surface, was an endorsement for the center left. The Labour Party, under Keir Starmer, romped home with one of the biggest parliamentary majorities in its history on a pledge to run the country better.

But dig deeper and a more fractured picture emerges. Surveys show roughly half of Britons say they hardly ever trust parties to put the country’s interests above their own—a far higher rate than just a few years ago. Thursday’s vote had the second-lowest turnout since 1885, with voters staying away from the polls, unexcited by the political options on offer. It also saw a much more splintered vote. Labour won only a third of ballots cast, while the Tories won only 24% of the vote. The rest were spread across a range of smaller parties offering more radical solutions. Four lawmakers were elected on a pro-Gaza platform capitalizing on Labour’s support for Israel. The pro-environmentalist Green Party also got four seats.

Reform UK scooped up older, working-class voters, many of whom voted for Brexit and are skeptical about immigration. In 2019, then Conservative leader Boris Johnson won these voters over with a pledge to “Get Brexit Done.” But by 2024, many of these voters felt disillusioned. Brexit hadn’t stopped immigration, which under the Tories rose to record highs in 2022 and 2023. Nor did it insulate them from the global economic shocks of the pandemic or the war in Ukraine.

“I want this Sunak out. And Starmer, I don’t think he’ll be any better,” said Anthony Hughes, 77 years old, who voted Reform in the latest election.

Analysis of the results shows how Reform UK won over a big chunk of right-leaning working-class voters. Compared to a previous iteration of the party called the Brexit Party, Reform UK votes rose by 16 percentage points in seats that the Conservatives were defending—twice the swing achieved in seats that Labour was defending, according to pollster John Curtice. The Tory vote fell by 12 points in less strongly pro-Brexit seats but fell nearly 30 points in the most staunchly pro-Brexit areas, said Goodwin, the professor.

A former commodities trader, Farage helped co-found the UK Independence Party and won a seat to the European Parliament in 1999, helped by proportional representation. He used his seat as a springboard for becoming an outspoken and colorful critic of all things European Union, once saying a top EU official had the “charisma of a wet rag” and the “appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.” His notoriety helped draw attention to his euroskeptic cause.

Back in 2010, former Tory leader David Cameron called Farage supporters “fruitcakes and loonies.” But as growing numbers of Tory voters went to UKIP and some of his own party defected, Cameron then promised a referendum on membership in the EU. Cameron fought against Brexit and lost. In 2019, the Tories promised a total divorce with the EU, and Farage agreed not to run in that election. The Tories got a huge majority.

One of the reasons Sunak called a surprise vote for this summer was in the hope that it would catch Farage off guard and he wouldn’t be able to get a campaign together.

Now, Sunak finds himself out of 10 Downing Street. The right-wing of his party, led by Suella Braverman, a former home secretary, has hinted that the party needs to embrace Farage and even welcome him into their party.

Others aren’t convinced and say that the only way to win again is to tack back to the center ground and try to convince middle-class voters to back Conservatism.

Reform UK’s campaign was blighted by undercover reporting showing Farage campaigners making racist comments. Farage has said now that he is in Parliament, he can better vet his candidates and professionalize his operation.

Farage also said the West provoked the war in Ukraine, causing even the conservative media to question him. Farage has stood by his remarks, but said that he “is not an apologist or supporter of Putin.”

Write to Max Colchester at [email protected] and David Luhnow at [email protected]