The Anti-Brexit Parties’ Big Mistake in EU Parliament Elections: Having Too Many Of Them
We are less than a month away from elections to the European Parliament, and as the UK will still be a member of the EU by then, they will have to send 73 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to Brussels.
The UK is one of five member states that doesn’t elect all of its MEPs from a single constituency. There are, in fact, 12 constituencies for the various regions of the country, each electing between three and ten MEPs. Because of this, the share of the vote a party effectively needs to get elected into Parliament goes up, ranging from around 9% in the South East (10 seats) to around 25% in the North East (3 seats). On the other hand, if all 70 seats in Great Britain were contested as a single constituency, the share of the vote a party would need to get any MEPs would be closer to 1.5%.
This presents a problem when you have several parties with a common cause. In particular, for the five parties who share an anti-Brexit, pro-second-referendum stance (Liberal Democrats, Green Party, Change UK, Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru), if their vote is split, then the prospect of any of them winning seats goes down significantly.
To demonstrate this, I will use a Survation poll conducted between 17–25 April (this is the most recent poll available). Notwithstanding the usual caveats about not getting overly excited about a single poll, what I want to demonstrate is the change across certain scenarios from the current base case.
Using the current system for electing MEPs, we would see the Labour and Brexit parties neck-and-neck for the most seats, with the Conservatives far behind. Two anti-Brexit parties would get only six seats between them, while three others would get none at all, despite having 10% of the vote between them.
The difficulty that a fractured cause faces in smaller constituencies is shown clearly when we treat Great Britain as a single constituency. Here, the anti-Brexit parties have a combined 13 seats, which is more than double what they have under the current system of constituencies. This is very close to the share of the vote that each party has in this poll.
But, like it or not, we have constituencies in this country, and as we can see, this hinders minor parties significantly. But what if the five anti-Brexit parties had joined forces and put together joint lists?
Such an anti-Brexit alliance would be far more powerful than the sum of their parts, picking up at least one additional seat in every constituency except for two. In the process of doing this, they would come very close to taking UKIP, who won the EU parliament election in 2014, out of the Parliament altogether, while also reducing the Conservatives to single figures in terms of seats.
But as Winston Churchill reportedly said in 1941, “United we stand. Divided we fall.” And for those parties that want to stop Brexit from happening, this would have been very sound advice before the nomination period closed.
