By Megan Kenyon
Copyright newstatesman
The local elections next year are already being touted as a make-or-break moment for Keir Starmer’s leadership. Voters in Scotland and several English local authorities will head to the polls in May 2026, but it is the elections to the Welsh Senedd that are likely to cause the most grief for the Prime Minister. Labour has been in power in the Senedd since it was created in 1999, and Wales has been a stronghold for the party for 100 years. Keir Hardie won his first Labour seat in Merthyr Tydfil in 1901. But according to the latest Welsh opinion poll, the PM (Hardie’s namesake) could be the first Labour leader to lose in Wales for a century.
On Monday evening, a new poll from ITV Wales placed Plaid Cymru on 30 per cent and Reform 29 per cent, way ahead of Labour on just 14 per cent. This is not the first poll to project a diminishment of Labour in Wales. Reform and Plaid Cymru have been almost neck-and-neck in the polls for some time and are mostly within a couple of percentage points from each other. Labour, however, is consistently trailing behind. If the polls are to be believed, with Plaid Cymru out ahead, the best Labour can expect to achieve next year is to be the minority party in a coalition. But it will certainly not hold the position of First Minister: this would be the first time Labour has not done so since the position was created in 1999.
Both Plaid Cymru and Reform are on the offensive. A Reform insider told me that while they doubt that they will win a majority of seats (the Welsh parliament has a proportional voting system), they hope to win enough to become a robust opposition within the Senedd. In parts of south Wales, such as Merthyr Tydfil, Reform are gaining ground. Laura Anne Jones became Reform’s first Senedd member when she defected from the Conservatives last year. Jones’s constituency – South Wales East – includes Merthyr Tydfil and covers a vast swathe of the former mining communities dotted across the South Wales valleys. At Torfaen Council, several former Labour councillors have defected to Reform, building up a small cohort which includes David Thomas, one of Reform’s spokespeople for Wales.
For Plaid Cymru, the chance of gaining the party’s first ever First Minister is almost within reach. Rhun ap Iorwerth, the party’s leader, is preparing himself for the challenge. “Plaid Cymru is offering a new leadership for Wales, and I use leadership in the widest terms,” he told me when we met in his offices at the Senedd earlier this year. “Leadership on a community level, leadership in terms of our vision for Wales, but also leadership in terms of who leads the Welsh Government and who becomes first minister”.
Welsh Labour sees Plaid Cymru as its primary threat. Mark Drakeford, a former Labour First Minister, told me earlier this year: “The real struggle for voter support in Wales has always been among progressive parties.”
Plaid Cymru clearly spies an opportunity here. “I think there’s been an assumption in Wales that Labour would reign forever,” Iorwerth told me. “I have no doubt in recent months without question accelerated by the election of Keir Starmer’s government that’s made people that think this maybe isn’t in Wales’s interest.” Plaid Cymru has tapped into a wider threat to the party from the left across the UK; but also recognised that voters are agitating for a change. “At a fundamental level, there’s something democratically unhealthy about having one party in charge for so long,” he added. “It holds back the regeneration of ideas and holds back the kind of energy that you get from the election of a new government.”
For Labour to lose Wales would be hugely damaging for the party, and for Starmer. But Welsh voters obviously feel that the party that has steered them through the past 25 years of devolution does not serve their priorities. It is probably too late for Welsh Labour to stop the oncoming slide of Reform and Plaid Cymru. And once Labour loses the Welsh vote, it will be extremely difficult to claw this once steadfast support back.
