For more than a year, opinion polls have indicated that Reform U.K., the right-wing populist party, was Britain’s most popular party as its leader, Nigel Farage, imitated President Trump’s anti-immigration agenda and railed against the Labour government.
Now, it’s looking increasingly official.
In early results from a set of local elections on Thursday, Mr. Farage and his party have emerged victorious in more than 400 council seats across England. The wins have come at the expense of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and the Conservatives, the parties who have led the country for decades.
“Labour are being wiped out by Reform in many of their most traditional areas, and what you’re going to see later on today is the Conservative Party being wiped out in their heartlands,” a beaming Mr. Farage told reporters Friday morning.
“It can’t continue to be a fluke or a protest vote,” Mr. Farage said. “I would honestly say you’re witnessing a historic shift in British politics. This is now the most national of all parties.”
Results are still being counted in thousands of council races across England and in contests that will determine control of the parliaments in Scotland and Wales. Mr. Farage confidently predicted that Reform would be shown to have fared just as well in those elections when the votes were all tallied.
“The best is yet to come,” he said.
Despite that optimism, there are still questions about the depth and durability of Reform’s popularity in a country where the traditional two-party system has fractured among at least five parties, including the Greens and the Liberal Democrats.
Mr. Farage’s party could end up with less than 30 percent of the overall vote in Thursday’s elections — more than any other but far short of a majority. If that result were mirrored in a general election for Parliament in the coming years, Mr. Farage would not be able to form a government alone and would need to form a coalition with another party.
Reform’s hard-line platform on immigration — including promises to deport hundreds of thousands of people — and its opposition to environmental regulation — including pushing for more fossil fuel use —are deeply unpopular in parts of the country. And some political observers believe Thursday’s voting may have been a reflection of anger against Mr. Starmer’s government rather than an affirmative show of support for putting Mr. Farage into power.
Still, this is the second set of local elections in a row in which Reform has demonstrated its ability to win a lot of votes.
A decade ago, the party was mostly a small, ragtag collection of politicians who campaigned for the United Kingdom to break from Europe. Now it will have more than a thousand sitting elected officials to spread its message. That will be a huge advantage for Mr. Farage in the run-up to the next general election for Parliament, which must be held by 2029. It could also be a test of the party’s governing abilities.
“We have professionalized the party,” Mr. Farage said Friday. “We’ve done it at a very, very rapid rate.”
That growth has come with controversies. This year, Reform received a donation of nine million pounds (about $12.2 million) from a backer of cryptocurrency based in Thailand. The donation was the largest single political contribution in British history.
And some of Reform’s candidates have been forced to apologize or step down after making contentious comments.
One Reform candidate in Wales stepped down in March after a picture surfaced that appeared to show him doing a Nazi salute. That same month, Reform suspended a mayoral candidate for describing members of a Jewish neighborhood watch group as “Islamists on horseback.”
