This year is being touted as an unprecedented year of elections with consequences across the globe. Hundreds of millions have voted from India to Indonesia to Mexico. This past month it was the turn of two of America’s most significant European allies, the U.K. and France, the two Western states that sit alongside the United States as permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. In November, of course, it is America’s turn.
Drawing inferences across political spaces that have their own political cultures, electoral peculiarities, granular public concerns, and personalities can be wading in hazardous waters. But a wave has been washing over the Western democratic political expanse these last months that could hold important clues and lessons for November.
That wave is the dramatic and unprecedented public mobilization in response to events in Gaza. The decades-long Israeli denial of Palestinian rights and freedoms has been a focus of any universal or progressive approach to human rights. Israel’s long-standing violations of international law are no justification for the crimes committed in southern Israel on October 7. At the same time, Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza, its unrelenting failure to adequately distinguish between civilian and combatant, the death and destruction inflicted on an already blockaded population, and the vast litany of self-incriminating Israeli statements, actions, and images appear to have impacted a reservoir of Western and global public opinion.
That wave of protest has spread from the streets and campuses of the U.K. and the U.S. to France and elsewhere—the slogans and the outrage at Western policy have had much in common. At its core, this wave wasn’t singling out Israel but rather acknowledging that in no other instance is the West so transparently and relentlessly undermining its own claim to stand up for international law, universal values, and human life. What helped was also the global connection drawn across movements around the world that saw Gaza as a central issue of injustice, as represented in the #NoClimateJusticeWithoutHumanRights campaign.
It is hard to miss the West’s undermining of international law to support the war in Gaza. The fact that the United States and U.K. have been arming Israel even as the chief justice of the International Criminal Court, or ICC, issues requests for arrest warrants for war crimes and the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, calls for urgent provisional measures to prevent irreparable harm to the Palestinian population has only intensified the outrage.
It was against that backdrop that the British and French electorates recently went to the polls, and it is against that backdrop that Americans will vote in November.
The circumstances of those elections have naturally been very different. The British voters have been through 14 years of Conservative governments, and more recently two back-to-back unelected and deeply unpopular prime ministers, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. The U.K. was primed for change, and Labour, under the leadership of Keir Starmer, had for months been accumulating a handsome and ultimately unassailable lead in the polls.
That was borne out with a landslide victory in terms of parliamentary seats. But scratch beneath the surface, and Labour’s blowout House of Commons majority looks a little more precarious. Despite a relentless Conservative campaign of self-harm, Labour under Starmer received 6 percent less of the U.K.-wide vote than his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, did in 2017, and in England failed even to improve on Corbyn’s 2019 vote share (a time when the previous Labour leader was being hounded by accusations of radicalism and antisemitism).
Labour ended up winning 64 percent of parliamentary seats with only 34 percent of the popular vote (distortions are a common occurrence in British politics under its first-past-the-post system, but this level of mismatch had never been seen before). A chunk of Labour’s traditional core vote had simply deserted the party, and the issue driving that is clear: Gaza.
We know this because a new phenomenon emerged, including the mobilization of a grassroots campaign calling itself “The Muslim Vote.” A slew of independent candidates, not all Muslim, was fielded in districts across the country. The Green Party had also led on Gaza, calling early and clearly for a cease-fire and respect for international law, securing four seats, up from one in the previous Parliament, in what is being viewed as a potential breakthrough election for that party.
The centrist Liberal Democrats also positioned themselves to Labour’s left in relation to Palestine-Israel. A high-profile Labour front-bencher lost his seat to one of these independents, and Wes Streeting, the most popular figure in the party, its new health minister, and a top contender for leadership in the future, came within a whisker (528 votes) of losing his district to a former unknown British Palestinian, Leanne Mohammed.
Starmer himself saw a drop in support in his own Holborn and St. Pancras constituency with votes siphoned off by Andrew Feinstein, an independent running against the Gaza war and U.K. arms sales and a former ANC member of South Africa’s Parliament to boot. Labour had spent several months refusing to endorse a cease-fire, disciplining parliamentarians who dissented on the issue, and failing to offer voters a clean break with the Conservative government’s policies on Gaza, including on arms sales to Israel.
Among Muslim voters and a slew of progressive and younger voters, positions on Gaza had translated into electoral choices. That had never happened before in U.K. politics. While some of it may have been a luxury vote, assuming an inevitable Labour win, Britain’s governing party is well aware of the consequences for maintaining its rule if this trend cannot be reversed. In sum, the evidence suggests that the narrative that Labour’s aggressively distancing itself from Corbyn-era criticism of Israel by aligning with the Sunak government on Gaza was an essential element of its success was not only wrong but precisely wrong, with that shift acting as a drag on the party in the current circumstances.
The French election is a very different story. A snap parliamentary election was called by President Emmanuel Macron following an unparalleled defeat in June’s European Parliament elections, in which Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, or R.N., secured the largest share of votes (31.37 percent) of any French party in European elections since 1984.
Macron almost dared the French electorate to put the far right into power. What happened next was probably not in Macron’s script—navigating decades of division, the French left and greens assembled a plausibly viable alliance named the Nouveau Front Populaire, or NFP—made up primarily of the left of La France Insoumise, the Green Party, the old traditional and much enfeebled Socialist Party, the French Communist Party, and the new kids on the block of Raphaël Glucksmann’s Place Publique. As negotiations to form a government continue, that alliance is showing signs of cracking.
France’s electoral system tends to produce second-round run-offs, and the NFP managed to reach sufficient common ground with Macron’s Renaissance to block Le Pen’s R.N. in the second round. The remarkable result was the dominant showing of the NFP alliance, which now forms the largest block in France’s Assemblée Nationale.
The key driving force in France was keeping the extreme, divisive, unashamedly racist/xenophobic and authoritarian far right out of power. Instructive in this story, though, was the degree of mobilization and enthusiasm on the progressive side, particularly among the youth. At the heart of that mobilization was Gaza, on which the left offered a clear and principled message.
France has witnessed its own popular mobilizations in response to events in Gaza, including protests at major universities such as the Sorbonne and Sciences Po. Polls show that most of the public supports both a ban on arms trade with Israel and the prosecution of Israeli officials for war crimes.
What has helped close the enthusiasm gap for the left, whereby previously momentum, energy, and excitement were all on the right, was a set of commitments in the manifesto of the NFP alliance. Those included support for an immediate cease-fire and enforcement of the ICJ and ICC rulings, calls for an embargo on arms deliveries to Israel, and calls for French and other European sanctions vis-à-vis Israel for its human rights and international law violations.
Is it a stretch to offer a read across from the U.K. and France to November in the United States? It shouldn’t be, given what we already know about the electoral realities that Democrats, and especially the party’s presidential campaign, are facing.
A clear message from the American electorate in the lead-up to the 2024 election is the desire for change and frustration with Washington’s seeming disconnect with the sentiments of many voters. The Uncommitted movement already garnered over 100,000 votes in Michigan’s Democratic presidential primary. That was people who were ready to make the effort to go to the polls and submit that Gaza protest ballot rather than staying home. The latter is considered the bigger threat in November.
Biden’s approval rating among Arab Americans, a key community in Michigan, hovers around 20 percent. A May poll of five battleground states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Arizona—found that one in five voters was “less likely” to vote for Biden because of Gaza. One can argue that this impact is marginal, but the fact is that the presidential election will be won or lost on the margins.
What we have witnessed are two messages, both of which should resonate.
First, in the U.K., there is a constituency simply not willing to hold its nose and vote for its traditional political home when the stakes on an issue so important to them are so high. Second, in France, a demonstration that enthusiasm and mobilization could shift in response to politicians listening and laying out an improved set of policies and doing the right thing.
As for the United States, while foreign policy rarely determines elections, a July 2024 Century Foundation/Morning Consult poll indicates that 2024 might be an exception. According to the Century Foundation report, “Many core constituencies—including independents, swing state likely voters, and Democratic Party activists—are angry at Biden’s unqualified support for the Israeli assault on Gaza... Nationwide, nearly four in 10 voters (38 percent) say they are less likely to vote for President Biden because of his handling of the war in Gaza.”
It is still not too late for Democrats to change course.
They have a harder task, as unlike their victorious U.K. and French counterparts
they have not been in opposition but rather in the driver’s seat of a
catastrophic policy of arming and supporting the devastation in Gaza. But
one thing is clear: Palestine will matter in November.
This article has been updated.
