Sadiq Khan, mayor of London since 2016, was re-elected for a third term in the municipal elections held on Thursday 2 May (counting began on the morning of Saturday 4). Khan will be the first mayor in the history of London to be re-elected twice: he was able to do this because in the United Kingdom there are no limits on the number of mandates for the office of mayor. However, the office of mayor of London has existed since 2000: previously the city was administered by a council of elected men and women, and for a transitional phase by the authorities of individuals boroughthat is, the districts.
Khan He obtained 43.8 percent of the votes, while Conservative candidate Susan Hall 32.7 percent. The other candidates obtained less than 6 percent of the votes. For Khan, it is a superior result to the 2021 elections, when he collected 40 percent of the vote, trailing the then Conservative candidate, Shaun Bailey, by less than 5 points. The turnout was 40.5 percent, slightly lower than 2021, when 42 percent of eligible voters voted.
Khan he was not a particularly popular candidate: he has been suffering for years very heavy attacks from the right – both nationally and internationally – on the grounds that he is a non-white, Muslim person. Some of his policies to reduce the emissions produced by cars in London then caused him to lose some consensus, especially among the inhabitants of the suburbs. In London, however, the Conservative Party is very unpopular, even more so than in the rest of the country: the Labor Party’s moment of great popularity may also have contributed to Khan’s victory.
The victory of Khan, who is one of the most recognizable faces of the Labor Party at a national level, is part of a broader wave of victories for the British centre-left, which has been in opposition at a national level since 2010. In the rest of the local elections held on Thursday to renew around a hundred English municipal councils, Labor gained 173 seats compared to the last elections, and had around a thousand councilors elected out of 2,600. The Conservative Party has instead lost around 450 councilor seats compared to the last elections.