“A Trump victory in November would galvanize ultra-nationalist parties across Europe, putting at risk Germany’s shaky governing coalition in next year’s election and possibly leaving Starmer as the last major center-left leader standing on the continent,” said Will Marshall, founder of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) in Washington.
“The giant black hole spinning at the middle of this is Trump,” said Matt Bennett, executive vice president for the Third Way think tank. “If Trump wins, we live in a new world. It’ll be Starmer alone, and God knows what will happen to the other Western democracies after that.”
Center left hero
Starmer won a 411-seat landslide at the U.K. general election this summer, ending almost a decade and a half of Conservative rule in Britain. The Tories were left with 121 seats in the House of Commons, their worst ever defeat, after switching leaders four times in a decade.
But center left movements in the U.S. argue the triumph wasn’t as simple as Starmer kicking the ball into an open goal. Labour still had to make sure it won Conservative voters to its cause in a few crucial ares, while being careful not to alienate other parts of the electorate.
PPI, Third Way and the Center for New Liberalism (a ground campaign offshoot of PPI) were among the center left groups that began rebuilding links with Labour soon after Starmer became leader in 2020, taking over from a far-left predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. Like-minded groups in the U.K. such as Labour Together, the Tony Blair Institute and the Institute for Public Policy Research were also involved in the conversations.
In exchange sessions between campaigners ahead of the U.K. election, U.S. strategists urged Labour to focus on non-higher educated working class voters — a group Trump hoovered up when he won in 2016.
