With his conservatively styled haircut and his penchant for navy blue shirts worn under a practical jacket - like a teacher preparing to hit the dance floor at a school disco - Keir Starmer may not be happy to be called boring, writes Politico magazine. But compared to the unbridled forces of chaos that have characterized British politics in recent years, the new prime minister's boring ordinariness is probably his strongest electoral asset, the publication points out.
The landslide victory of Starmer and his centre-left Labor Party over the Conservative Party in the UK general election is proof that boring is not always bad in politics. Starmer capitalized on the sentiment of voters who were clearly desperate for just an end to the madness.
"A lot of people we spoke to in focus groups say [Starmer] is boring, but maybe boring is what we need right now,'' says Luke Trill, executive director of the political consultancy company "More in Common" (More in Common). "There is certainly both exhaustion from the chaos in the Tories (Conservative Party - note.ed.) and a general feeling that there is no end to the politicking,", he adds.
The question now that Starmer will now have to govern is whether his dullness will continue to pay dividends or begin to hinder him, notes "Politico".
At first glance, the result of the British election appears to be in stark contrast to the upcoming elections in the US, where President Joe Biden is trying to stabilize his candidacy against the backdrop of Donald Trump's lead, and in France, where the president's centrist faction Emmanuel Macron lost the parliamentary elections to far-left and far-right rivals.
The American centrist think tank "Third Way" published a memo analyzing the election results and saying they represented a "triumph of ruthless competence", setting Starmer's campaign up as a model for other centre-left leaders facing right-wing nationalism.
However, the results of the elections are hardly a harbinger that Britain is moving to the left, states "Politico". Rather, it is about something deeper - about broken promises and broken trust, about dysfunctional public services and high household bills, about a collective thirst for change. It is about a strong disenchantment with politics. The tidal wave that swept the Conservative Party may not be so different from the wave against the establishment parties in France.
Starmer, and indeed Sunak, diagnosed many of the problems facing the country during the campaign - in fact, they could hardly have missed them. But the solutions offered were vague at best. Experts warn that Labour's limited promises on tax and spending will not be able to meet the scale of the crisis. And the voters know it - despite Starmer's victory, the total number of votes for Labor is far lower than in the 1997 or 2001 elections. Actual voter turnout was the second lowest in a hundred years.
Although Labor won almost two-thirds of the seats in parliament, it received only one-third of the total vote share, according to the online edition of Time magazine. Voter turnout across the country was lower than in the last parliamentary elections in 2019, hovering around the 60% level. While this does not affect the scale of Labour's victory, it may indicate the degree of disillusionment many Britons feel with their politicians, the paper notes.
With the Conservatives in opposition, the Labor Party will now be tasked with delivering the change it has promised. This includes formulating plans to address key campaign issues, such as reviving Britain's ailing NHS and strengthening the country's ties with its European partners.
"We will have a Labor coalition that is incredibly broad but also incredibly shallow, and elected on a platform that doesn't address some of the huge problems facing the country,'' says Anand Menon, director of the London-based think-tank " "Britain in a Changing Europe". If there is such a thing as 'too much of a good thing', for Labor it will be precisely this: The party can now claim a base that spans north and south, town and country, poor and rich. Balancing the needs of all these constituencies and retaining their support will be a challenge," he adds.
"Starmer can become very unpopular pretty quickly," Menon also points out. "The only thing that really matters is whether it gets results - and that means getting growth, delivering public services, while at the same time saying it won't raise some taxes," the commentator explains.
The Associated Press quoted Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, as saying the main question is whether Starmer will be able to restore public services quickly enough to meet expectations.
"The NHS is in crisis," says Bale. "It will take a lot of money to fix her condition. The question is where Labor will get that money from and how quickly they will be able to do it," he adds.
One sign of the volatility of public mood and the general mood of anger at the system is that Britain's parliament will be more fractured and ideologically diverse than any in years, AP said.
Smaller parties collected millions of votes, including the centrist Liberal Democrats, which won 71 seats - up 60 from the last election. The Green Party won four seats, whereas before the election it had only one.
And although the overall result seems at odds with the recent rise of the right in Europe, including in France and Italy, many of the same populist currents have emerged in Britain as well, writes the "Guardian". The most disturbing result of the election is probably that the hard right won seats in parliament. Under party funding rules, Nigel Farage's group will receive cash from taxpayers. He will also be entitled to more air time.
His party "Reform United Kingdom" is the third largest political force in Great Britain by share of the electoral vote. One in seven voters supported a party with members praising Hitler as a "genius" and calling blacks "rabbits from the jungle", and some of whose creators had ties to fascist organizations, the publication commented.
Few politicians are as adept at shaping a narrative as Farage, and he can easily point to his party's 14% public support, which equates to just 0.6% of seats, and tell people : "You were ripped off, just like on immigration,", the "Guardian" points out. The fight for these parliamentary seats in some constituencies was extremely contested. In many cases the difference between Labor and the far right was only a few thousand votes. The message is clear - constituencies in the north of England that Labor once claimed as its own now face a serious threat from a demagogue who takes inspiration from Donald Trump.
Throughout the election campaign, both the Conservatives and Labor avoided challenging Farage. Starmer's team even withdrew their candidate from the traditional Labor constituency of Clacton.
However, the Labor government will now urgently need to start making efforts to improve the everyday lives of its constituents, especially in those de-industrialised areas in the north of the country, in order not to quickly lose their trust. This is a huge challenge given the austerity policies that look set to dominate this decade, the British publication concludes.