LONDON — Britain’s Labor Party has defeated the Conservatives in a historic parliamentary election for control of the nation’s government. With the majority of votes counted, here’s a breakdown of the numbers:
The Labor Party has won 412 seats. (a majority of 63%) of the 650 seats in the lower house of Parliament. One seat remains undeclared.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives have 121 seats, the smallest number in the party’s two-century history, and down from 365 seats in 2019.
The smaller parties obtained millions of votes, including the centrist. liberal democrats, which obtained 71 seats, 60 more than in the last elections. And one of the biggest losers was the Scottish National Party, which held the majority of Scotland’s 57 seats before the election but looked set to lose almost a handful, mainly to Labour.
Each seat represents a geographical area of the United Kingdom. The leader of the party with enough seats to win a majority, either alone or in a coalition, becomes prime minister and heads the government.
Labour’s landslide victory brought a new party to power for the first time in 14 years.
Parliament had been directed by the center-right Conservatives since 2010. They had faced challenge after challenge, including Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and soaring inflation.
Many voters blamed the Conservatives for the litany of problems facing Britain, from unreliable train service to the cost of living crisis and the influx of Migrants crossing the English Channel.
In 2010, the Labor Party was overthrown after being in power for 13 years, the longest period in its history.
By the end of his last reign, the popularity of the Labor Party had plummeted. This was partly due to the deep recession in the UK caused by the 2008 global financial crisis.
Labor and Conservative candidates They could barely gather 60% of votes cast in this election, marking a new low.
Over the last 100 years, the two British main political parties They have obtained the vast majority of votes. In 1951, for example, the Conservatives and Labor won almost 97% of the vote combined. In the decades since, the trend has been clear: downward.
The two main political parties had candidates for more than 600 of the 650 seats in Parliament, according to the House of Commons Library. But so did three other parties: Liberal Democrats, Greens and Reform.
An average of seven candidates (from almost 100 different political parties) ran for each seat. the library took note. Nine parties presented more than 50 candidates.
The total number of people running for a seat in Parliament this year was 4,515, the library reported. There are more than a thousand more than in 2019.
Despite this relatively low percentage of votes, the Prime Minister Keir Starmer will be able to govern with a massive majority in the House of Commons.
In Great Britain, the candidate with the most votes in each constituency wins. even if they do not obtain the majority. This makes it easier for a party to win a seat with a relatively low share of the vote, especially when the votes are spread across many parties.
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