General election outcomes in the UK and France, along with ongoing election turmoil in the US, have created an impression of political and societal instability in key countries of the West and seem likely to generate questions over the state of global leadership.
The consequences of polls in Britain, which saw Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party sweep to power, and a “hung” parliament in France, are unlikely to be dramatic initially in terms of the two countries’ bilateral relations with Asia, and foreign relations in general. However, leaders in both countries have heavy domestic agendas to address. That said, Starmer starts with the advantage of a huge parliamentary majority to helping to implement domestic and foreign policy. French president Emanuel Macron on the other hand will find himself constrained by the need to balance opposing parliamentary forces and to form ad-hoc coalitions.
Viewed in the context of a fracturing and right-tilting Europe and a divided US, the changed state of political play in the UK and France (as with that in the right-wing swinging countries of the Netherlands and Italy) suggests that Asia may need to adjust to a new set of global political dynamics.
The consensus among analysts so far as the UK is concerned is that Starmer will use his huge majority to push through domestic reforms such as in the National Health Service and new housing provisions. By extension, the Labour leader will be content, for the moment at least, to remain broadly within the foreign policy framework and institutional arrangements set by his immediate predecessors within the defeated Conservative Party. And if this proves to be true it would see Britain bolstering its defence and economic ties with Japan, supporting AUKUS (its trilateral security partnership between the US and Australia agreed in 2021), becoming a “dialogue partner with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and an active member of the CPTPP or Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.It would also see the UK maintaining somewhat at arm’s length its economic and diplomatic relations with China, while continuing to warm towards both NATO and “Indo-Pacific” initiatives pushed by the US and Japan, among other allies.
Starmer and his close political allies said relatively little on these issues in the run up to the election. And so far as France is concerned, Macron too has his work cut out in dealing with domestic issues, including hosting the Olympic Games in Paris this month. He also needs to choose a new prime minister from within the leftist New Popular Front or the Far Right National Rally party rather than from within his own centrist alliance. A new prime minister could in theory constrain Macron’s freedom of manoeuvre on policymaking but the President himself holds key powers on defence and foreign policy by virtue of the fact that he is head of the French armed forces and of negotiating and ratifying international treaties. Foreign affairs were “not a central issue” in the French election as the Japan Times pointed out in a report.
The situation in both the UK and France is fluid, however, and not only because in their anxiety to project a stable, moderate and middle of the road image Starmer and his political lieutenants have been outspoken only on safe domestic issues. It is fluid also in the sense that the global context is itself changing.
Shifting political sands in Europe and the US have made China and even Russia appear as models (even if authoritarian ones) of stability by comparison, while the rapidly expanding BRICS bloc (originally Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa but soon to embrace Kazakhstan, Malaysia and Thailand among others) is beginning to take on a new identity as a strategic and energy alliance that Western powers in general will need to look to their laurels if they wish to retain the crown.