Konstantin Kisin is Wrong About Farage
Reform's leader is not comparable to The Donald
Recently, Konstantin Kisin shared some comments he made two weeks prior regarding the rise of Reform, and how calls for Reform to democratise the party were ill-advised owing to the success of the Republican party under Trump’s near-singular leadership. In his view, everything runs through Trump and this is to the benefit of the Republican party as a whole.
Comparisons between Farage and Trump are inevitable. Both represent the populist side of the right, which has made some cold, hard, political gains as of late. These comparisons are not unwarranted, but a little perspective is always warranted. When Boris was elected in 2019, he quickly received the moniker of ‘British Trump’ owing to his inheritance of the Vote Leave campaign which was characterised by a more populist stance on national policy. However, in time, it was shown that the only thing Boris and Trump had in common were their waistlines.
So perhaps when Farage returned to politics to lead Reform, people naturally shifted their associations of ‘British Trump’ from Boris to Farage. These comparisons are equally ill-advised.
On the first point, that everything runs through Trump - this is flatly false. US senators have large amounts of power, and entire states larger and wealthier than the United Kingdom in which to exert their power and prove themselves as leaders. While none of them have come close to challenging Donald Trump, this is owing only to the hold Trump has on the Republican base and not because anyone in the Republican party would sooner see a Democrat win than elect President Ron DeSantis. It’s simply that when stacked up against Donald Trump, they come up short. Regardless, they still have and exert this power with minimal to no interventions from Trump. They run their local organisations, campaign, fundraise, and court special interests fairly detached from the auspices of the President simply due to the second big difference between Farage and Trump: The party Trump runs is one half of a two-party system.
The task before Trump and the task before Farage are two completely separate beasts. Trump has successfully taken over one of the two major parties in the American democratic system. There is no real challenger on the right, and Trump himself remarked on this during a Joe Rogan interview - he is intimately aware of the fact America is a two-party system and his desire to change the country could only be carried out if he took over the mechanism of the Republican party. Farage however, is attempting to oust the most successful political party in (global!) parliamentary history. It is yet a total unknown if Reform will even repeat its feat at the last election. Other third parties have come much further, and fallen from far greater heights. The Liberal Democratss had 62 seats in 2010, and they enjoy far more play with the general public than Reform. The job for Reform is to show that it can produce talented MPs who can handle their constituencies well and provide serious opposition to Labour, if it fails to do this then things will likely revert to the mean and people will begin to vote Conservative again provided they come across even slightly competent at opposing Labour.
This is not an issue for Trump. The Republican party existed long before Trump, and will likely exist long after him. There are plenty of capable senators and potential senators in the ranks of the Republican party. If you asked anyone “could the Republican party produce a president without Donald Trump”, there is no-one on any side of the political aisle who could seriously say no. If you asked the same question about Reform, I would not be surprised if even a sizeable portion of Reform voters said that the party was not there yet. The Republican party will not cease to exist should Trump die tomorrow, Reform would almost certainly die without Farage.
This is further evidenced by the simple fact that despite good polling owed almost entirely to Tory failure, discussions around Reform only picked up pace upon Farage’s return. Taking the year of 2024 up until election day, we can see a doubling of the average interest - which never returns to its previous average - on June 3rd, when Farage announced his return.
The previous peaks on the 3rd of May were also not jumps for Reform out of genuine interest, but instead the day Farage declared he would not stand for the party. You only have to go back a decade to see what a Republican party without Trump looks like, it is impossible to separate Farage and Reform without relegating it to the irrelevancy of Tice literally yelling at clouds.
These two factors: the need for Reform to produce talented MPs, and its current existence depending solely on one person is the crux of the issue. Articulated first by Ben Habib, and now by Lowe. Reform has not yet shown itself to be capable of winning elections or even attaining political relevancy without Farage at the helm. Trump does not need to “democratise” the Republican party or divest power because the machinery he inherited was already sufficiently divested to allow talented politicians to rise the ranks, rival and oust the leader, and then take these new leaders into the highest office of state. If Reform is to survive, then it will have to provide its members and representatives with power to enable them to prove themselves. As I said in a recent Critic article, the personality of Farage will not permit that. He will oust potential rivals before their nascent political careers can take off.
Not even Trump is so clueless as to rid himself of a potential rival within his party, and is even willing to forgive them and bring them into the fold should they change their minds. Upon receiving the nomination, Trump faced a wave of Republican figures who opposed him and declared themselves ‘Never Trumpers’. One of these was Mitt Romney, who resigned his post. Another was Liz Cheney, where Trump endorsed another candidate in a primary to get her ousted, thereby keeping the seat Republican but removing internal opposition. The last, and most important being JD Vance. While Vance switched sides, it’s important to note Trump tolerated Never Trumpers in the party, allowed them to switch sides, and left open the possibility of them receiving the second highest office of state for joining his side.
Farage’s ousting of Lowe is not a Trumpian move to ensure the party can stay a steady course and continue making gains, it was an attempt to remove a talented potential rival before they could ever see success. His refusal to democratise the party is not to keep Reform agile, it is done out of a mistaken belief that his star power has no upper limit, and his party can continue making gains as long as he is the leader. This may well be enough to win 5 seats in an election aimed explicitly at punishing the Tories, but it is not enough to convince people to elect Reform MPs, especially now that they’ve seen that capable and talented MPs are not what Farage and therefore Reform is looking for.