Voters abandoned mainstream center-right parties for the populist right in the U.K. and French elections this month but failed to convert support to electoral gains amid a right-wing vote split and tactical voting by the left.

Britain’s Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, won a landslide election victory, scoring 412 seats in the 650-seat Parliament, eclipsing the mainstream Conservative Party that managed to hold on to just 121 seats after losing 244 seats. 

This was the worst performance in the Conservatives’ nearly two-century history amid the surge of upstart populist Reform Party, led by ‘British Trump’ Nigel Farage, that received over four million votes but gained only five seats.

In France, a broad leftist coalition consisting of hardline communists, environmentalists and socialists won 188 out of 577 seats in the parliament, seconded by French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance Ensemble (ENS), which won 161 seats, forming a ruling majority. 

France’s populist National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, won over 37% of the vote and was the single most popular party among French voters, yet it came third in the number of parliament seats. The mainstream center-right Republicans came a distant fourth, with just 6.2% of the vote.

‘What was quite clear was that this was a rejection of the Conservative Party, the mainstream Conservative party,’ Alan Mendoza, the executive director of the London-based Henry Jackson Society, told Fox News Digital. ‘In France, they got a very high turnout for France, and in that case, it was clear that this was an anti-National Rally election.’

The elections demonstrated the voters’ persistent support for political movements embracing right-wing populism on issues related to immigration, crime and social issues while abandoning milquetoast traditional center-right parties for failing to bring meaningful change.

Yet, the insurgent populists came up short of converting the widespread support at the voting booth to electoral gains due to tactical voting agreements and support split among right-leaning voters.

‘In both cases, the left-wing parties were able to maximize their votes, and the right-wing parties were not able to maximize their votes,’ Mendoza said. ‘It’s been said that Labour’s support is a mile wide and an inch deep, but that’s what you need to win British elections with large numbers of support without being focused in certain areas,’ Mendoza added about Labour’s lower overall popular support.

‘The reality in France was that various left-wing parties and Macron got together and basically shut the right out, but the right did not do a similar thing. The Republicans stayed in the race and did not give way to the National Rally or vice versa.’

Le Pen’s National Rally came out on top in the first round of voting last month after campaigning on significantly reducing immigration and crime and improving the economy. 

The populist party was on the cusp of winning the majority of seats in the second round, but the effort was curtailed after a tactical election agreement was struck between Macron’s centrists and the leftist coalition. Both parties agreed to withdraw candidates to avoid splitting the anti-National Rally vote.

Farage’s Reform Party was the third-most-popular party with over four million votes across the U.K., but due to Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, in which the candidate with the most votes in the area wins the seat, the party ended up with just 1% of the seats in the parliament. 

The mainstream Conservatives got over two million more votes than the Reform Party but remain the second-largest political force in the country, prompting calls to reform the electoral system to give more representation based on the total votes.

Despite winning a historic number of seats in the U.K. Parliament, the Labour Party won the election with 9.6 million votes, down by over 600,000 votes, compared to its 2019 election results, when the party led under controversial socialist Jeremy Corbyn suffered two separate election defeats.

‘In some cases, the Reform vote was probably mostly conservatives who had left the Conservative Party and decided to go there. But the far bigger component in Britain’s case was people who just decided not to vote at all,’ Mendoza said. ‘The Conservative vote share went down 20 points, and a lot of conservatives who voted Conservative in 2019 just stayed at home and were not inspired by any of the parties.’

In the 2019 election, the Conservatives, under the leadership of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, won the majority of the parliament seats after campaigning on a populist platform of ‘Get Brexit Done.’ The Reform Party’s predecessor, the Brexit Party, stood down its candidates in the election to boost the Conservatives.

In the aftermath of the elections, influential Conservative figures argued that the ‘Conservative family’ consisting of the Reform Party and the Conservatives still beat Labour and won the majority of the votes – over 11 million – indicating the voters’ overall right-leaning bent.

Suella Braverman, a potential Conservative Party leadership contender, criticized the party’s performance in a speech at the Popular Conservatives conference and urged the party to embrace populism for the sake of the party’s future.

‘To my mind, the Reform phenomenon was entirely predictable and avoidable and all our own fault,’ she told the audience. ‘It’s no good denigrating Reform voters, it’s no good smearing the Reform party, it’s no good comparing Reform rallies to the rallies of Nuremberg. That’s not going to work. Criticizing people for voting Reform is a fundamental error to make.’

She further urged the Conservatives to ‘restore credibility on the core conservative policies that unite’ and address the immigration issue, ‘because we’ve been weak, we’ve been squeamish, we failed to tackle this very pressing concern.’

In France, although failing to gain legislative power, National Rally maintains populist momentum and is eyeing the 2027 presidential elections, with Le Pen primed to take control of the country’s highest office.

The new parliamentary majority of leftists and centrists, meanwhile, leaves Macron, already deeply unpopular, facing the prospect of presiding over a politically paralyzed hung parliament.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

A second Trump presidency is giving supporters hope of a continuation of his first-term policies, while critics worry that he’ll isolate the U.S. on the global stage at a delicate time for the international security landscape.

Richard Goldberg, senior adviser at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a former Trump administration NSC official, told Fox News Digital he sees a second Trump term as ‘going back to the basics of peace through strength [and] restoring deterrence.’ 

‘They’re prioritizing China as our top threat to national security,’ Goldberg said, referencing the campaign’s platform. ‘Investing in our military, modernizing our military, expanding the use of AI and space, to ensure that we are able to overpower the CCP and Beijing and its wider access around the world.’

Trump’s foreign policy record has remained a key point of comparison between him and his successor, President Biden, with many arguing Trump took an isolationist ‘America First’ approach that damaged relations with key allies. 

‘Isolationism is about going it alone and about viewing America’s way of engaging the world as unilateral and independent and alone, as opposed to building multilateral alliances — a sort of unilateral mindset,’ Joel Rubin, a former State Department official during the Obama administration, told Fox News Digital.

‘The U.S. can’t always act unilaterally, but that doesn’t need to be the predisposition,’ Rubin argued. ‘Trump never ignored the world, no, but what his foreign policy was focused on was America acting independently and unilaterally, and that I think is where there’s a difference. The United States is a leader, not an independent actor.’

Golberg disagreed with that assessment, arguing people often ‘mistake populist rhetoric for isolationism … or, certainly, some sort of instinct not to use force when necessary to defend the United States.’ 

‘The president was tested by Iran, and Qassem Soleimani lost his life because of it,’ Goldberg said as an example. ‘There was that moment where I think President Trump demonstrated to all the enemies of the United States that he’s not an isolationist. He’s a conservative. That’s following basic conservative principles of peace through strength, willing to show deterrence … which means you have the capability, but also the will, to use force when necessary.’

Rubin lamented that Trump’s hard-line stance on NATO ally contributions to defense spending hurt relations between the U.S. and such a vital network of allies and worried what that might mean for the alliance at a time when Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine requires unity and strength. 

‘Turning away from American alliances has put us in a hole that we’re barely coming out of now, and, thankfully, Biden restored our alliances with NATO,’ Rubin said, adding that the deal to withdraw from Afghanistan, which Trump first brokered and Biden decided to uphold, ‘really put us in a weak position.’ 

That fear remains firmly in mind for European leaders as they worry about what happens next in the event Russia succeeds in subduing and conquering Ukraine. Jens Spahn, a lawmaker of Germany’s center-right opposition party CDU, told outlet DW during the NATO summit in Washington, D.C., last week that ‘we should not make the same mistake again’ with Trump.

‘No one really had a network with his team,’ Spahn said, explaining the several meetings NATO delegations had arranged with Republicans close to Trump’s camp, DW reported.  

Ricarda Lang, co-leader of the German Green Party, meanwhile, argued that Trump’s vice resident pick of Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, left little doubt that Trump would ‘deliver Ukraine to Putin’ after Vance said in 2022 that he didn’t ‘really care what happens in Ukraine one way or the other.’ 

Rubin acknowledged that Trump made some positive contributions to the global landscape, such as through the Abraham Accords, which he judged as ‘a positive contribution to the Middle East’ along with Trump’s handling of North Korea. 

‘I thought that it was very important for him to do what he did with North Korea, in terms of making the effort to engage and speak with Kim and seek progress on the nuclear program,’ Rubin said, though he noted that, ‘unfortunately, nothing really came out of it.’

‘I think the lack of a real commitment to its symptomatic program with North Korea was a loss when he had opened up something in a way that had not been done before, which I thought had a lot of promise,’ Rubin added. 

Goldberg defended several Trump-era policies as significant wins for American foreign policy, mainly touting global stability during the majority of Trump’s pre-pandemic administration. 

‘Russia was deterred from any sort of aggression in Eastern Europe — certainly not an invasion of Ukraine,’ Goldberg said. ‘Iran was running out of money, almost bankrupt. And after the killing of one of the world’s leading terrorists, Qassem Soleimani, they stopped expanding and escalating their nuclear enrichment.’

‘Israel was not facing a seven-front war, and, obviously, other actors, most importantly, China, had to think about what was next as the United States was investing more in its military, spending more on its defense industrial base, trying to finally accelerate what was needed to compete with China and potentially win a war in the future against China,’ Goldberg added. 

He acknowledged, though, that Trump faced typical growing pains for a new president when he took office and was slow to begin some of his more effective policies, such as the ‘maximum pressure’ campaign on Iran. 

‘I think his instincts are always to do the unexpected, to do something that hasn’t been tried before,’ Goldberg argued. ‘If everybody’s tried doing things the same way and it hasn’t achieved the right result, maybe there is a different approach. And I think we’ll see more of that in a second term.’

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned on Friday that Iran could produce fissile nuclear material in ‘one or two weeks’ as the State Department renews a sanctions waiver for Iraq to buy Iranian energy.

Critics were quick to blame the Biden administration for enabling Iran to pursue nuclear weapons by allowing the rogue nation to sell its oil. Biden reversed many of former President Trump’s tough sanctions against Tehran.

‘What’s breathtaking is the complete lack of self-awareness that it was his own maximum deference policy that brought us to this moment, and worse, that his solution is to double down on the failed appeasement strategy,’ Rich Goldberg, senior advisor at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and former Trump administration NSC official, told Fox News Digital.

‘Rather than snapping back the U.N. sanctions and testing maximum pressure, the administration just extended a sanctions waiver and is conducting indirect negotiations via Oman,’ Goldberg lamented. 

Blinken spoke this week at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, addressing Iran’s march toward a nuclear weapon and admitting that ‘instead of being at least a year away from having the breakout capacity of producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon, (Iran) is now probably one or two weeks away from doing that.’ 

Blinken blamed the collapse of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – commonly known as the Iran Nuclear Deal – for Iran’s accelerated development. He stressed that the U.S. has not seen any evidence to suggest Iran already has a nuclear weapon, Barrons reported. 

Iran’s acting Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri claimed that his country remained committed to the JCPOA, insisting that ‘America has not yet been able to return’ to the deal and that Iran seeks a return to the 2015 deal.

‘We are not looking for a new agreement,’ Bagheri told CNN earlier this week. ‘Neither I nor anyone else in Iran has not talked and will not talk about a new agreement. We have an agreement (signed) in 2015.’

Iran continues to receive sanctions relief through waivers that the U.S. has issued since the Trump administration in 2018, allowing Iraq to import energy from Iran for 120 days at a stretch. The latest renewal occurred on July 11 as Iraq suffered widespread power outages due to the unbearable heat overloading power grids across the country, MEHR News Agency reported. 

‘’We have renewed this waiver for the 22nd time, and it is about the department permitting Iraq to purchase Iranian electricity while Iraq continues to develop its domestic generation capacity,’’ US State Department Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel said at a press briefing.

‘’It is a waiver authority that allows the purchase of electricity over a certain period of time, in this case, 120 days, so it’s permission for an activity over a period of time,’’ Patel told Iraqi news outlet Rudaw. 

‘’We have, over the past decade, seen some measurable steps of Iraq weaning off Iranian electricity,’’ Patel added. ‘Currently, we anticipate that they are relying on Iran for about 25% of their electricity. A number of years ago, that number was 40%.’

Blinken reiterated this point, saying that Iraq has doubled its domestic output, but many American politicians remain concerned that Iran benefits from these waivers and have used the funds to help continue developing their nuclear weapons program. 

The Biden administration insists that the funds remain out of reach for the Iranian government, instead funneling through third-party ‘restricted accounts’ that can only purchase food, medicine, medical devices, agricultural product and other non-sanctionable transactions.

Critics, however, argue that it displaces funding requirements for Iran and frees up the country’s spending so that money it would have otherwise put towards those purchase now goes toward funding its proxy groups and developing nuclear weapons. 

‘Let’s be honest with the American people and understand that Hamas knows, and Iran knows they’re moving money around as we speak, because they know $6 billion is going to be released. That’s the reality,’ Nikki Haley said last year when news broke that the State Department had agreed to release funds in exchange for U.S. prisoners in September. 

Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies with a focus on Iranian security and political issues, told Fox News Digital that the Biden administration has remained on ‘auto-pilot’ and pursued ‘short-sighted’ policies when it comes to Iran, at their own peril. 

‘With stories about Iran-backed plots to kill the former president and reports of weaponization related work in Tehran, the last thing Washington should be green-lighting is yet another waiver extension that permits the Islamic Republic to free up revenues to continue to underwrite more global terror and domestic nuclear expansion,’ Taleblu said. ‘It’s one thing to see the need to help wean Baghdad off of Tehran and Iranian electricity and energy, but it’s another to continue to use this as a crutch for a better policy towards both Iraq and Iran.’