LONDON (AP) — The hard-right party Reform UK led by Nigel Farage won a seat in Parliament by a handful of votes and looked set to make more gains in results Friday from local elections the party hopes will show it is a major player in British politics.
Reform’s Sarah Pochin was declared winner of the seat of Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by six votes after a recount, defeating Labour candidate Karen Shore.
Labour easily won the district in last year’s national election, but its lawmaker, Mike Amesbury, was forced to quit after he was convicted of punching a constituent in a drunken rage.
Although Reform’s victory was one of the narrowest in British history, Farage said “it’s a very, very big moment indeed” for politics.
“We are not a protest party, even though there is much to protest about,” Farage told reporters at the election count.
The local elections Thursday in many areas of England were a test of feeling about Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s center-left Labour government, 10 months after it was elected in a landslide. Both Labour and the main opposition Conservative Party braced for losses in the midterm poll.
The Runcorn victory gives Reform, which got about 14% of the vote in last year’s national election, five of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. National polls now suggest its support equals or surpasses that of Labour and the Conservatives, and it hopes to displace the Conservatives as the country’s main party on the right before the next national election, due by 2029.
Reform candidate Andrea Jenkyns — a former Conservative lawmaker — was declared winner of the newly created mayoralty of the Greater Lincolnshire region of east-central England. Labour retained three other mayoralties.
Reform hopes to scoop up hundreds of municipal seats in the elections that are deciding 1,600 seats on 23 local councils, six mayoralties and one seat in Parliament. Ballots in most of those contests are being counted Friday.
The centrist Liberal Democrats also hope to build on their success in winning more affluent, socially liberal voters away from the Conservatives.
A majority of the local seats being contested were held by the Conservatives, whose leader Kemi Badenoch could face revolt if the party does very badly.
Badenoch acknowledged that the results could be “very difficult” for the Tories. The party did extremely well when these areas were last contested in 2021, a time when then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government enjoyed a surge in popularity due to the COVID-19 vaccine program.
Reform UK is the latest in a series of parties led by Farage, a veteran hard-right politician who was crucial in taking Britain out of the European Union through a 2016 referendum. A charismatic campaigner, he is a divisive figure who has said many migrants come to the U.K. from cultures “alien to ours.”
Reform blends Farage’s longstanding political themes — strong borders, curbing immigration — with policies reminiscent of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration. During the campaign Farage said he plans “a DOGE for every county” in England, inspired by Elon Musk’s controversial spending-slashing agency.
University of Strathclyde political scientist John Curtice said the results showed that politics in Britain, long dominated by the two big parties, was fragmenting and that “Reform are now posing a big threat to both Conservative and Labour.”
“They are a major challenge,” he told the BBC.
