Hours after Prime Minister Liz Truss announced her resignation, the newspaper began The Independent a petition to force a general election. “It’s high time the voters decided who should rule the country,” reads the petition — a striking stance in a country that has been known as a democracy since the 1215-sealed Magna Carta.
Still, Truss’ Conservative Party is fully within its rights when it turns a deaf ear to the increasingly louder call for a ballot and appoints its own prime minister for the second time in a year. The British voter has at the last general elections in 2019 his mandate was given neither to Truss nor to her predecessor Boris Johnson, but to the Conservative Party.
That’s right. The United Kingdom has a constituency system: in the most recent parliamentary elections, a Conservative candidate won in 356 of the 650 constituencies. That party therefore has a large majority in the British House of Commons. Nothing has changed after Truss’ resignation.
Until the government has to call new elections, the Conservatives can continue to supply a prime minister. In principle, this is not necessary until the end of 2024: the House of Commons will sit for a period of five years. In the meantime, it can be dissolved if, for example, Labour, the largest opposition party, submits a motion of no confidence against the government and finds a majority in favor of it. However, with the current distribution of seats, that is unlikely.
Internal election struggle
The new leader of the Conservative Party is therefore expected to automatically receive the house key to 10 Downing Street. The Party has launched an internal election campaign for this in the coming week. Anyone who enjoys the support of at least a hundred Conservative members of the House of Commons can run for office. If two or three politicians meet that condition, all party members choose a winner online.
As prime minister, the new party leader of the Conservatives can also decide to call general elections earlier, in order to get a kind of mandate of his own. However, given that the Conservatives are 36 percentage points behind Labor in the polls, that scenario is unlikely.
This state of affairs may seem undemocratic, but in theory it could be this way in any country that does not directly elect its leader. For example, the Dutch cabinet could pass on the premiership from Mark Rutte to Sigrid Kaag, Wopke Hoekstra or anyone else – as long as the House of Representatives gives its approval. An important difference here is that in the Netherlands no party has a parliamentary majority on its own.
In 1982 a comparable situation actually occurred in the Netherlands. After five years as premier, Dries van Agt was persuaded to once again act as party leader of the CDA. After the elections, however, he pushed Ruud Lubbers forward. For example, the Netherlands received a Prime Minister who was not yet regarded as a candidate by the voter in the voting booth.