Is it Starmer or the system? On Monday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that he will resign, a decision that came after weeks of speculation about his exit and months of slipping poll numbers. Starmer is the sixth prime minister in the past decade to say his farewells from No. 10 Downing Street, and one of several leaders across Europe feeling anti-incumbency pressure to depart.
So, how much of Starmer’s exit was the man himself? How much the British state? And how much the wider politics of European liberal democracies? Our experts look at each factor below.
Starmer: Communication breakdown
Less than two years ago, Sir Keir Starmer won a general election in a landslide, bringing Labour back to power with a 174-seat majority after fourteen years in opposition.
Starmer’s tenure as Labour leader should be considered across his six years as leader, and not just his two as prime minister. As leader of the opposition, Starmer was ruthlessly effective in wresting control of the party away from the Corbynite left back to the political center, and back to electability.
Starmer won the 2024 election on a platform of stability and competence after years of post-Brexit turmoil. But the scale of his victory masked critical challenges. Labour won 34 percent of the popular vote—the lowest of any victorious party on record and a reflection of both the nature of the UK’s first-past-the-post system and the growing fracturing of traditional party politics.
Starmer’s honeymoon in power was notably short, with social tensions spilling into riots in Summer 2024. Assuming he would have at least five years in office, Starmer was candid about the scale of the challenge facing the country and his approach to front-load unpopular economic choices that he and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves argued would reap benefits later in the term.
Even his allies would acknowledge that Starmer is not a natural born political communicator, and his inability to articulate a clear vision that could bring the country with him through tough choices undermined his standing with the electorate. An early cut to winter fuel allowances was poorly judged, and his popularity spiraled. Belated U-turns on unpopular proposals could not un-ring the bell with the public. Labour activists were taken aback at the vehemence of reactions to Starmer personally on the doorstep during the recent local elections.
Arguably Starmer’s strongest performance as prime minister was on foreign affairs: rebuilding constructive relations with Europe, leading support for Ukraine, and early and effective courting of US President Donald Trump were all notable accomplishments. But political reality caught up with him here too. His tendency to try and please both sides caught him out at the start of the Iran crisis, offering qualified support to US operations that torpedoed his relationship with Trump but didn’t fundamentally change domestic perceptions of his leadership. The appointment of Peter Mandelson as the British ambassador in Washington was a scandal that Starmer could not shake off.
Defense was perhaps the final nail in his coffin, with a stinging resignation from his respected Defence Secretary John Healey that cut to the heart of the fundamental critiques of Starmer’s leadership.
Starmer was too left-wing for the right, too right-wing for the left, and too lacking in charisma and communications skills to bring the country with him. There is no guarantee that outgoing Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham—the heir apparent whose return to parliament was the final trigger for Starmer’s resignation—will turn things around. Labour members of Parliament are reluctant to fall into the same cycle as their Conservative predecessors, but they have concluded that only a change of leader could prevent a damaging defeat in the 2029 election.
—Philippe Dickinson is a deputy director with the Transatlantic Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He previously served as a career diplomat with the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
The United Kingdom: In part, a lasting legacy of Brexit
On the eve of Brexit’s tenth anniversary, another British prime minister has resigned. The event that triggered the resignation of David Cameron in 2016 was followed by a much faster turnover in prime ministers than the UK and the world were used to seeing in Downing Street. Starmer’s successor will be the sixth since Cameron. The period even boasts a record with Liz Truss’s forty-nine days in office, the shortest ever prime ministerial term.
So Brexit must be the driver of this acceleration in British political life, right? Yes and no.
The decision to leave came after a clever campaign that minimized the hard choices associated with the decision. Despite centuries of precedent, the British parliamentary system struggled to deal with this tension between aspiration and reality whether ruling majorities were large or absent. The deal that was ultimately done by Prime Minister Boris Johnson (he who fled from the leadership campaign that came straight after Brexit and was won by “Remainer” Theresa May) delivered an exit from the European single market and customs union, which many Leave voters were led to believe wouldn’t happen. The United Kingdom’s lagging prosperity and fiscal woes can at least partly be blamed on this.
But none of these points fully explain why each prime minister has had a shorter term than expected. Each departure has come with its own specific circumstances (from Johnson and Partygate to Starmer and his ill-judged appointment of Mandelson). The job has become more relentless with the twenty-four-hour news cycle and a sense of polarization that will be familiar to US readers. And so Starmer’s would-be successor Burnham has a chance to use the sizable majority he will inherit to turn things around, or be caught up by the UK’s lagging prosperity. Some of this was caused by Brexit but every premiership ended in its own set of mistakes or by defeat in the polls. Next time, if Burnham is defeated in the polls, it will be by a populist party.
—Charles Lichfield is the director of economic foresight and analysis and the C. Boyden Gray senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center.
European liberal democracy: Eroding faith in mainstream politics
This is the last-chance saloon for mainstream politics in the United Kingdom. The Conservative Party badly tarnished its brand with numerous changes in leadership during its period in power, and now the Labour Party appears to be following suit. With the 2029 election looming, non-traditional parties further to the right and left are waiting in the wings if Burnham fails to change perceptions.
But this is not a new nor exclusively British phenomenon. There has been much comment on the irony of this latest departure from Number 10 coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum. But Britain’s and Europe’s governance problems go deeper and can be traced back to the 2008 financial crash. Decades of low European growth and compounding and diverse crises have exhausted public faith in mainstream politics. The Brexit example shows that there are no simple answers.
The revolving door in Downing Street is the United Kingdom’s manifestation of this malaise, but it has its echoes in many other peer European nations. In Germany, the once-dominant center-left and center-right parties are being threatened by fringe parties. In France, the standard-bearer center-left and center-right parties were ousted in 2017 by President Emmanuel Macron’s upstart centrist party, which is itself under threat from fringe parties today. Both Macron’s and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s polling numbers are currently worse than Starmer’s.
This is happening in a dangerous world, during a consequential geopolitical moment. This matters for all advocates of a secure and dynamic transatlantic community. For Europe to address the multifaceted and complex challenges it faces, it requires steady leadership, strategic vision, and grip, undergirded by sustainable financing and institutional coordination. That can only be achieved with deep wells of political will. Failure would have serious and far-reaching consequences.
—Philippe Dickinson