London. Britain’s Conservatives lost major London constituency councils on Friday in a local election with test value for Boris Johnson, who despite being weakened by scandals could survive if the main opposition party gets mixed results.
The Labor Party, the leading opposition force, gained control of the highly symbolic Westminster district, the seat of British political power, for the first time since its creation in 1964.
And it also wrested other key London strongholds like Barnet and Wandsworth from the Conservative Party.
“Wandsworth and Westminster were iconic councils,” tweeted Gavin Barwell, former chief of staff to former Prime Minister Theresa May. “Losing them should be a wake-up call for the Conservative Party,” he stressed.
But the Conservatives, in power for 12 years, could simply be paying for the wear and tear of Johnson’s three-year term, amid discontent over soaring inflation, which could top 10% this year.
The elections were held on Thursday. This Friday morning only the votes had been counted in a third of English councils and several of those lost by the Conservative Party were not at the hands of its main rival but of the centrist Liberal-Democratic Party and the environmentalist Green Party.
The rest should be known during the day, as well as the results of these local elections, which generally mobilize voters little, in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
In this last of the four nations that make up the United Kingdom, the deputies of the autonomous regional Parliament were voted, from which the next local government must come out, which could be the scene of a true political earthquake.
Its final results are not expected until Saturday but the polls gave the first place to the republican party Sinn Fein -former political arm of the IRA, which advocates the reunification of Ireland- for the first time in the hundred years since the partition of the island, in 1921.
However, the Good Friday peace agreement, which in 1998 ended three decades of bloody conflict between Catholic Republicans and Protestant Unionists, establishes a sharing of power between the two camps. And if Sinn Fein and the unionists of the DUP do not agree, the formation of a government would be blocked.
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