Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham, Labour executive, was comfortably elected MP in alternate elections, an election victory allowing him to take a position to succeed Kir Starmer in the position of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
With 54.8% of the vote, i.e. a difference greater than 9,000 votes, 56-year-old Andy Burnham, a former minister under Gordon Brown and since 2017 mayor of Manchester, won Robert Kenyon by a difference of 34.5%), a candidate for Nigel Farage's anti-immigration Reform party, in the district of Maykerfield near Manchester (northwest England).
The Reform, which has been the first in the national polls for months and in early May, won the local elections in this region, thus suffering a major defeat. It faces the competition of a new, more far-right party, Restore Britain, whose candidate Rebecca Shepherd came third to 6.8% of the vote, with a distance ahead of the Conservative candidate (2.2%).
"I tell my party: it's a last chance to change," Burnham said when the results of the vote were announced, which recorded a large turnout.
"The whole world knows that politics does not work, the whole world can feel that the country is not currently where it should be. This evening he can mark a turning point," he added applauded by his followers.
Reuters notes that Andy Burnham's victory means that he will now be able to challenge or participate in a race to replace Starmer, who records some of the worst popularity rates any leader ever had. But the key question, according to the British agency, is when and how it will do it.