An unfair landslide? | Expert opinions

The most ironic successes have been won by the centrist Liberal Democrats. The Liberals have long advocated proportional representation: they were the third-largest party in England for much of their existence, but have remained a marginal force in politics. In the last election, in 2019, their leader, Jo Swinson, tried to put herself on a level playing field with the major parties. She presented herself as a potential prime minister and focused on contesting every possible constituency. The Liberals increased their vote share by four percentage points – but actually reduced their number of seats from 12 to 11. In 2024, by contrast, the party has ruthlessly focused on fewer than 100 winnable seats. They have shifted resources there and nominated their candidates well ahead of their rivals. The party leader has avoided presenting herself as a potential prime minister and has instead focused on a few, but sensitive, policy issues.

Incredibly, the Liberal Democrats’ share of the vote increased by only 0.6 percentage points, while their share of seats in Parliament increased six-fold, to 72. They won the most seats in a century. And yet first-past-the-post is so fundamentally biased against small parties that, even after this historic and targeted performance, they still only hold a share of seats in the House of Commons that is broadly equivalent to their share of the vote.

Labour’s Keir Starmer now has an unassailable mandate to govern, with just a third of the vote. The comparison with England’s neighbours across the Channel is striking. In that country, in another unexpected snap election, the centrist coalition associated with President Emmanuel Macron lost a large number of seats. In the end, neither the left-wing coalition, nor the centrists, nor the right-wing populists, who came in third unexpectedly, have a majority.

France also has first-past-the-post electoral districts, but with two rounds of voting. In the second round, only a subset of candidates who performed well can run. This allows votes to shift from the least competitive candidates to the most competitive candidates. The French left and center, which have been at loggerheads for years, agreed to block the far right in the second round. Almost all left-wing voters voted for the centrists, while a smaller, but still majority, group of center voters voted for the left. This was enough to relegate the right, which had come out on top in the first round, to third place. The question of “who won” this election is therefore very confusing and still a matter of debate.

In a sense, the French system transforms the usually opaque issue of tactical voting into something transparent, easy to understand and discuss. The reason why Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the UK seem to have done so well with such a small percentage of the vote is that their voters behaved very tactically. Liberals in Labour-dominated constituencies voted for the left, while Labour supporters in Liberal strongholds did the opposite. They did this without the need for a run-off to clarify their preferences, because voters generally knew which of the Conservative Party’s opponents was most likely to unseat them in a given region. Indeed, the Liberal Democrats’ campaign slogan in these regions was simply: “Liberal Democrats win here,” a signal that it was safe to vote for them.

In fact, one cannot judge the fairness or unfairness of first-past-the-post voting based on vote shares alone. Whether voters have enough information to vote tactically is also important. In India, it is generally difficult to know who is competing in a given region. This means that tactical voters can have a hard time, especially in four-member constituencies such as in Uttar Pradesh. Pre-election coalitions tend to be more common in Indian elections than elsewhere in the world, precisely for this reason.