Leader Nigel Farage, a Trump ally, hopes to position anti-immigration party as significant political force in UK.
The radical-right Reform UK party has made gains in local and by-elections, seeking to establish itself as a significant political force.
The anti-immigration party won a fifth parliamentary seat, gained its first mayoralty, and took a number of seats on local councils, results on Friday showed. Reform hopes to ride growing support to unbalance the United Kingdom’s political system, which is traditionally dominated by the governing Labour Party and opposition Conservatives.
“It’s been a huge night for Reform,” said Reform leader Nigel Farage after the party was declared winner of the seat of Runcorn and Helsby.
The victory in northwest England, previously a Labour stronghold, came by just six votes.
Reform also prevailed in a mayoral race in Greater Lincolnshire and picked up dozens of council seats from Labour and the Conservatives in the first polls since general elections last year.
The results appear to underline the fracturing of the UK’s political landscape.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer led Labour to one of the largest parliamentary majorities in British history in last year’s election but has gone on to suffer the fastest decline in popularity of any newly elected government.
Brexit champion Farage, a populist who has allied himself in the past with United States President Donald Trump, noted that the win in Runcorn and Helsby, which Labour won in last year’s national election with a majority of almost 15,000 votes, showed that the ruling party’s vote had “collapsed”.
Labour has lost support as the government has raised taxes, cut benefits for the elderly and proposed sweeping welfare reforms, alienating the left-wing party’s traditional voter base and driving some into the arms of Reform.
‘Soft-touch Britain’
In Greater Lincolnshire, newly elected mayor Andrea Jenkyns, a former Conservative minister who defected to Reform after losing her seat last year, became the party’s most powerful elected politician yet, with responsibility for an area covering about a million people.
In her victory speech, Jenkyns pledged to bring an end to “soft-touch Britain” and said asylum seekers should be held in tents, not in hotels as they often are in the country.
“The rebuilding begins here … we’re going to have a Britain where we put British people first,” she said.
Reform UK is the latest in a series of parties led by Farage, a veteran hard-right politician who was crucial in taking the UK out of the European Union through a 2016 referendum. A divisive figure, he has said many migrants come to the UK from cultures “alien to ours”.
Reform, which has pledged to “stop the boats” of irregular migrants crossing the English Channel, is hoping that winning mayoralties and gaining councillors would help it build its grassroots activism before the next general election – likely in 2029.
The party hopes to scoop up hundreds of municipal seats in the elections that are deciding 1,641 seats on 23 local councils and six mayoralties, as well as the parliamentary seat.
Ballots in most of those contests are being counted on Friday and results should be announced in the afternoon.