Britons are voting in local elections on Thursday that will give an idea of the damage the ‘partygate’ scandal has done to Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party and promise to be decisive for Northern Ireland, where Republicans Sinn Fein are hoping for a historic victory .
• Read also: After Watching Porn In Parliament, British MP Resigns
The replacement of thousands of seats on local councils in England, Scotland and Wales will allow voters to have their say at the polls for the first time after months of revelations about parties held in Downing Street during lockdowns.
And could thus, in the event of poor results, convince certain wait-and-see deputies of the majority to withdraw their support for Boris Johnson, determined to remain in power despite the fine received, unprecedented for a prime minister in office.
Far from the heartbreak of Westminster, a political earthquake is looming in Northern Ireland where polls give Sinn Fein the lead in the local Assembly for the first time in the 100-year history of the British province of 1 .9 million inhabitants, under tension since Brexit.
Polling stations open at 06:00 GMT on Thursday and close at 21:00 GMT, with the first results known overnight from Thursday to Friday in England and then extending into the weekend.
“Hostage”
In Northern Ireland, the vote could redefine the United Kingdom. The latest poll of the campaign gives an eight-point lead to Sinn Fein, in favor of reunification with the Republic of Ireland, ahead of the Unionists of the DUP, the first party of the outgoing assembly, neck and neck with the centrist party Alliance.
A victory for Sinn Fein, the former political showcase of the Irish Republican Army, would propel its vice-president Michelle O’Neill to the post of head of local government, supposed to bring together nationalists and unionists under the peace agreement of 1998.
But it could also lead to paralysis.
During the latest election debate on the BBC on Tuesday, DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson warned his party would refuse to form a new executive unless the UK government suspends the province’s post-Brexit special status, which undermines loyalists links with the rest of the UK.
Michelle O’Neill accused him of “taking the Northern Irish hostage”. She assured that her party, which campaigned on the left insisting on the crisis of purchasing power, was not “obsessed” with a vote for reunification.
Shopkeeper in a unionist district of Belfast, Alaine Allen expressed to AFP her concern about a possible victory for Sinn Fein but was critical of the DUP: “I hope they will win, but no one is really working for the people”.
Inflation
In the rest of the United Kingdom, these local elections, which generally mobilize very little, will reveal the state of mind of voters towards the Conservatives in power, after criticism of their management of the pandemic, their measures deemed insufficient to help the households strangled by inflation and “partygate”.
The popularity of Boris Johnson, 57, soon to be three in Downing Street, collapsed after this scandal which earned him a fine and calls for his resignation. He has so far weathered the storm, highlighting his leading role in Western support for Ukraine, but disastrous results on Thursday could change that.
Making his case worse, he was put in trouble on television at the end of the campaign on the subject of purchasing power.
Labour, the main opposition party, hopes to take advantage of its weaknesses, even if its leader, Keir Starmer, 59, has himself been accused of having broken health rules for having shared beers and curries with his team during of a trip in April 2021.
Labor is hoping to win seats in London, including in traditionally conservative strongholds such as Westminster, Wandsworth, Kensington and Chelsea.
Labor also wants to win back its former strongholds that became conservative in the last election in 2019 in northern and central England.
In Dudley (north), Bob, a retired worker will vote Labor to “protest”, he explained to AFP: “What drives people crazy is the cost of living, food costs more and more expensive, energy too”.