The governing British Labour Party got clobbered in yesterday’s 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. 

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.

The action now shifts to an intra-party struggle over whether Labour’s feckless leader, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, can keep his job. This morning, the Scottish Labour Party leader, Anas Sarwar, facing a wipeout, called for Starmer to resign as party leader and prime minister.

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If pressure for Starmer’s ouster mounts, the most plausible successor is Manchester’s popular and effective mayor, Andy Burnham. He’d need to find a seat in Parliament, but that could be easily arranged.

The problem is not just Starmer’s leaden personality, but his lame program. Starmer has sought to reassure Britain’s financial capitalists with fiscal conservatism rather than supplanting them with a bold program of reinvestment. He has also ducked what to do about Brexit.

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—but lacks the will. And thanks to Britain’s electoral system, the government doesn’t 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.

The contrast with Spain, Europe’s best-performing economy and the only other large European country with a left government, is stunning—and instructive. Unlike Starmer, Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, had just about nothing going for him, except leadership and conviction.

Sánchez’s governing Socialist Party lacks a majority in Spain’s parliament, the Cortes. The Socialists are not even the largest party. That would be the center-right Partido Popular (PP). But while Sánchez is a bold and effective leader, the PP is led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, whose feeble leadership style has a lot in common with Britain’s Starmer.

Sánchez has led three governments since 2018, governing in coalition with smaller left parties. Podemos, a populist party to Sánchez’s left, was part of one such coalition, but Podemos fractured and collapsed. Its successor as Sánchez’s governing coalition, Sumar (Unite in English), is a weak sub-coalition of left splinter parties grateful to be included in Sánchez’s cabinet.  

Sánchez 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.

And Sánchez’s 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. 

By contrast, Sánchez welcomes immigrants, and immigrants have helped spur Spain’s stunning economic growth rate of just under 4 percent per year 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.

Immigrants from Latin America can enter Spain without visas and can get permanent residency and Spanish citizenship within two years. In January 2026, Sánchez authorized a royal decree to regularize some 500,000 undocumented immigrants residing in Spain.

Spain’s 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’s prosperity.

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The government’s housing rights bill, enacted in 2023, includes rent control and high taxes on second homes, as well as increased construction and safeguarding of public housing. The program operates in tandem with Spain’s progressive wealth tax.

While other European leaders have temporized, Sánchez has been blunt in his criticism of Trump’s Iran war, denying Trump the use of Spanish military facilities. In May 2025, Sánchez called Israel a “genocidal state” and said that Spain “does not do business” with such a country. 

He has been careful to distinguish criticism of Israel from antisemitism. Spain has a law of return allowing open immigration by Jews of Sephardic ancestry. By contrast, the British Labour Party, badly divided over the issue of Israel and antisemitism, has lost support to the Greens who have been forthright in their criticism of Israel.

Moral of the story: When the left leads with a program that delivers real benefits to real people, the left wins.

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Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is Notes for Next Time: Surviving Tyranny, Redeeming America. Follow Bob at his site, robertkuttner.com, and on Twitter.