Reform and Plaid likely to benefit from polarisation of Welsh politics

O n a sunny but cold evening in a shopping centre car park on the outskirts of Merthyr Tydfil, Reform UK supporters enjoyed free pizza and loud music as they waited for what the party leader, Nigel Farage , said was his last big speech before Thursday’s Welsh Senedd, Scottish parliament and English local elections. Reform could win the most seats under Wales’s new more proportional voting system but it is unlikely to be able to form a government, as other parties have ruled out going into coalition with it. Yet Farage’s outfit is the first rightwing party with a shot at winning in Wales since the 1850s. The surge in support for a party that got 1% of the vote in the last Senedd election is impossible to ignore. “A coalition of losers blocking the biggest party [Reform] will backfire, if that’s what happens,” the party’s Welsh leader, Dan Thomas, told the Guardian. “I think that the people of Wales will be very determined next time around to make sure that the biggest party wins.” After more than 100 years of dominance in Wales, support for the Labour party has collapsed, with former voters seemingly going to Plaid Cymru or, in lesser numbers, to Reform – opposite ends of the political spectrum. The two parties have been neck and neck throughout the campaign. Laura McAllister, a professor of public policy at Cardiff University, said the Welsh nationalists and Farage’s party were in a similar position. “The definition of ‘winning’ is always contestable in PR elections. …