After looking at democracy, attention turns to the star teams in the sport of representative democracy: the parties.
Contrary to popular opinion, Wales isn’t quite a one-party democracy.
Examples of one-party democracies (also called one-party dominant states) include South Africa (ANC), Japan (Liberal Democratic Party) and Singapore (People’s Action Party). More historic examples include Fianna Fáil’s dominance of Irish politics until the 2010s and Labour’s previous dominance in Scotland.
Historically, Wales has what you could call a “one-and-a-half-party” system. There’s one dominant party (Labour) alongside two significantly smaller but somewhat influential parties (Conservatives and Plaid Cymru).
Labour has long held the majority of the political levers within Wales, but this influence is contained to post-industrial areas which also happen to have the largest populations.
The Conservatives’ only real exercise of political control in Wales – other than at council level – is through the UK Government when they’re in power.
Plaid Cymru dominates in Welsh-speaking Wales (Y Fro Gymraeg) and has had success in getting some of its policies through at the Senedd level by working with Labour; the most recent example being the Sixth Senedd co-operation agreement.
Those three parties represent the broadest spectrum of political ideology in Wales, simplified to, using Balsom’s three Wales model: centre-left Unionism from “Welsh Wales” (Labour), centre-right Unionism from “British Wales” (Conservatives) and centre-left Welsh nationalism from “Y Fro Gymraeg” (Plaid Cymru).
Fallen giants, populists and challenger parties
At time of posting this, seven political parties have representation at either the UK Parliament, Senedd or local authority level. Aside from the “Big Three”, the other parties include the Liberal Democrats, Greens, Propel and Gwlad.
The Lib Dems are the fallen giant of Welsh politics. If counted as the successor of the old Liberal Party, they were the first dominant political force in Wales. They’ve often proven useful in coalitions with either Labour or the Conservatives – though never benefiting from it.
One party on a upward trajectory (outside of the Big Three) is the Greens. While the Greens saw a mini-breakthrough at the 2022 local elections, it follows many near misses at Senedd level. Having long been punished by electoral mathematics, the new threshold to win Senedd seats in 2026 is still likely to be too high for them to hit.
Then there are the populist and challenger parties.
UKIP, the Brexit Party (now Reform UK) and Abolish the Assembly have been previous represented at EU Parliament and Senedd level – though the last of those has never won seats in its own right.
The only one to have any significant electoral success was UKIP in 2016 – though they don’t exist as a threat anymore. The 2016 Senedd intake will go down as an embarrassing experiment, but polls currently project that Reform UK (effectively a UKIP splinter party) could win a significant number of Senedd seats in 2026, becoming a fourth “big player” (at least temporarily).
After inexplicably being given a BBC platform in the run-up to the 2021 Senedd election, Abolish the Assembly has largely disappeared from public discourse – though anti-devolution sentiment hasn’t gone away and you might expect Reform UK to pick that up (if the Tories don’t beat them to it).
During the 2021 Senedd election, I said Propel has potential even if its electoral results then and since haven’t lived up to it. For the sake of categorising them, they cover the populist angle from the centre to centre-left, promising more “power to the people” – though have had dalliances with lockdown sceptics.
The least populist of the challenger parties is arguably Gwlad who, if you base your opinion entirely on their manifesto, are centre-right – possibly even libertarian-leaning – covering a spectrum of nationalist opinion that’s not catered for elsewhere. At an individual level some of the personalities involved have expressed questionable views – and there’s the little matter of not vetting candidates properly.
The Independent Influence
While only two Members of the Senedd have been elected as Independents – John Marek (2003) and Trish Law (2007) – Independent politicians have a long history of success at council level. At that level they’ve long out-performed the Conservatives, Plaid Cymru and the Lib Dems.
Excluding politicians who sit as Independents for disciplinary reasons, there’ll be different reasons why Independents are locally successful, but still struggle at Senedd or UK Parliament level:
- A belief that party politics should stay out of local government as the responsibilities are too focused for partisan campaigning to be worthwhile.
- Independents can campaign on hyper-local issues that get traction at a community level, but wouldn’t make a dent at a national level.
- Independents may lack the campaign resources to successfully run a regional/constituency or national-level campaign.
- Political parties can make more concrete promises at a national level because they may be in power or lead the opposition; an Independent by themselves may be good at horse-trading in budget deals but little else. If they form an organised group, then aren’t they a political party too?
- Independents might be well known at a ward/community level, but candidates for the major political parties can count on more media exposure.
