France and Britain’s Electoral Conundrums
The outcomes of the recent elections in France and the United Kingdom illustrate the pitfalls of winner-take-all electoral systems. While the UK’s historically skewed election has triggered calls to reform its first-past-the-post system, France’s political deadlock speaks to a potentially even larger structural problem.
LONDON – The outcome of the United Kingdom’s general election, in which Keir Starmer’s Labour secured two-thirds of the seats in Parliament despite receiving just 33.8% of the vote, shows that Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero was right: “Nothing is more uncertain than the masses, nothing more obscure than human will, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral process.”