As warm spring weather and effusions of greenery spread across our disordered continent, Americans are understandably mesmerized by the widening chaos, unresolved conflict and bottomless corruption of Donald Trump’s second presidency. The world is watching too, and in broad strokes the news from abroad reads like a rejection of Trumpism: As I and others have observed, the MAGA-sphere’s clumsy efforts to boost overseas far-right parties seem to have backfired, fueling victories for “centrist” mainstream forces in Canada, Australia, Germany and elsewhere.

Yeah, not so fast: The new dawn of global democracy may be less glorious than advertised, not to mention a lot more confusing. While we were preoccupied with Trump’s paramilitary forces of masked kidnappers, his will-he-or-won’t-he dance with the federal courts (eventually you know he will) and Qatar’s so-called gift of a $400 million jumbo jet — is it a Trojan horse or a white elephant? — the storied and deeply weird democracy of the United Kingdom has been quietly sliding into the abyss. 

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Or maybe it has: Whether the shocking results of Britain’s local elections on May 2 — and the subsequent Democrat-style dithering of the governing center-left Labour Party — amount to the first stage of political Armageddon or just a disconcerting blip on the global radar screen remains to be seen.

Let’s back up a few steps, because there’s a lot to unpack here: As you may recall (although it seems like a thousand years ago), Labour won a massive parliamentary majority in last July’s British general election. That ended 14 years of increasingly shambolic rule by the Conservative Party, which had itself won a whopping victory in 2019 under the since-disgraced Boris Johnson. But here’s the thing: That big win was a largely illusory artifact of the increasing fragmentation of British politics. Yes, Labour captured 411 of the 650 seats in Parliament — on just 33.7 percent of the national vote. 

In last July's election, Labour got one-third of the vote but won two-thirds of the seats, an anti-democratic outcome with no clear precedent in the U.K. or anywhere else. 

Seriously, that’s extraordinary: One-third of the vote and nearly two-thirds of the seats. That distorted outcome has no clear precedent, not just in the U.K. but in any other parliamentary democracy, and........

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