The governing British Labour Party got clobbered in yesterday\u2019s local elections, pretty much as expected. The final votes are still being counted, but as of this writing Labour is on track to lose as many as 2,000 municipal council seats out of about 5,000, an all-time record defeat, and lose its governing majority in at least 20 councils.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The big winners were the far-right Reform Party, with at least 600 pick-ups, and the left-populist Greens. And the Scottish Nationalists look to win a large governing majority in the Scottish parliament, rekindling a drive for secession.<\/p>\n
The action now shifts to an intra-party struggle over whether Labour\u2019s feckless leader, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, can keep his job. This morning, the Scottish Labour Party leader, Anas Sarwar, facing a wipeout, called for<\/a> Starmer to resign as party leader and prime minister.<\/p>\n More from Robert Kuttner<\/a><\/p>\n If pressure for Starmer\u2019s ouster mounts, the most plausible successor is Manchester\u2019s popular and effective mayor, Andy Burnham. He\u2019d need to find a seat in Parliament, but that could be easily arranged.<\/p>\n The problem is not just Starmer\u2019s leaden personality, but his lame program. Starmer has sought to reassure Britain\u2019s financial capitalists with fiscal conservatism rather than supplanting them with a bold program of reinvestment. He has also ducked what to do about Brexit.<\/p>\n Thanks to the fluke of the last general election, where Labour won only 33.7 percent of the popular vote but gained 411 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons, Labour has the power to enact a far-reaching progressive program\u2014but lacks the will. And thanks to Britain\u2019s electoral system, the government doesn\u2019t need to call another election until August 2029, giving Labour plenty of time to recover. In short, Labour has everything going for it except leadership, vision, and nerve.<\/p>\n The contrast with Spain, Europe\u2019s best-performing economy and the only other large European country with a left government, is stunning\u2014and instructive. Unlike Starmer, Spain\u2019s prime minister, Pedro S\u00e1nchez, had just about nothing going for him, except leadership and conviction.<\/p>\n S\u00e1nchez\u2019s governing Socialist Party lacks a majority in Spain\u2019s parliament, the Cortes. The Socialists are not even the largest party. That would be the center-right Partido Popular (PP). But while S\u00e1nchez is a bold and effective leader, the PP is led by Alberto N\u00fa\u00f1ez Feij\u00f3o, whose feeble leadership style has a lot in common with Britain\u2019s Starmer.<\/p>\n S\u00e1nchez has led three governments since 2018, governing in coalition with smaller left parties. Podemos, a populist party to S\u00e1nchez\u2019s left, was part of one such coalition, but Podemos fractured and collapsed. Its successor as S\u00e1nchez\u2019s governing coalition, Sumar (Unite in English), is a weak sub-coalition of left splinter parties grateful to be included in S\u00e1nchez\u2019s cabinet.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n S\u00e1nchez has had to do a deft balancing act to keep the Catalan separatists on board, giving them more autonomy but stopping short of supporting Catalan secession. This is no mean feat. Compared to the Catalans, the Scots are model United Kingdom patriots.<\/p>\n And S\u00e1nchez\u2019s popular program is the only serious left governing program in Europe. The British Labour Party is sorely divided on the immigration issue, which has helped the far-right Reform Party gain ground in the absence of a bold Labour economic program.\u00a0<\/p>\n By contrast, S\u00e1nchez welcomes immigrants, and immigrants have helped spur Spain\u2019s stunning economic growth rate of just under 4 percent per year<\/a> between 2021 and 2025, by far the best in Europe. During the same period, Spain has admitted an average of about 665,000 immigrants per year.<\/p>\n Immigrants from Latin America can enter Spain without visas and can get permanent residency and Spanish citizenship within two years. In January 2026, S\u00e1nchez authorized a\u00a0royal decree to regularize some 500,000 undocumented immigrants residing in Spain.<\/p>\n Spain\u2019s right-wing Vox party has tried to promote and take advantage of an anti-immigrant backlash, but this is far less effective than it might be because of the obvious contribution of immigrants to Spain\u2019s prosperity.<\/p>\n Today On TAP<\/p>\n This story first appeared in our free Today On TAP newsletter, a weekday email featuring commentary on the daily news from Robert Kuttner and Harold Meyerson.<\/p>\n