Conservative Party’s fortune is cautionary tale for GOP

LONDON — Five years ago, British Prime Minister David Cameron looked like a modern conservative ready to offer the Republican Party a model for the future. Today, four days before critical elections in Britain, he is a politician fighting for a second term and buffeted by many of the same problems and pressures that afflict and divide the Republican Party in the United States.

There are some important differences between the Republican Party and Britain’s Conservative Party. There is no Christian conservative movement in Britain, for example. So the parallels are imperfect. But the long-term prognosis for both is similar. Negative images and changing demographics combine to put both parties in a defensive posture — even as they claim some election victories along the way.

What has happened to the Conservatives over the past half-dozen years is a cautionary tale about the difficulties of rebranding a long-standing political party, lessons that are likely to play out inside the GOP over the next year as the party picks its 2016 presidential nominee.

As Mr. Cameron’s experience has shown, striking a balance between energizing the party’s conservative base and attracting new voters through modernizing efforts is far from easy. More than stylistic shifts and cosmetic changes are needed to bring about real change against the forces of resistance. Britain is in the final days of one of the most fascinating and unpredictable elections in a generation. Neither Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party nor the Labour Party under leader Ed Miliband appear able to command a majority of seats in the House of Commons. That would lead to a messy aftermath that could leave either party in charge but hardly in control.

Even if the Conservatives emerge from Thursday’s voting with the most seats in the House of Commons, Mr. Cameron might not be able to hold on as prime minister. If he does remain prime minister, it will not erase the party’s structural problems. If anything, the campaign has highlighted them.

Almost any outcome would remind Conservatives, the dominant political party in Britain over the last century, of how far short they have fallen over the past 18 years. Even if they win Thursday, this would be the fifth consecutive election in which they have failed to capture a majority of seats, and they haven’t won more than 36 percent of the national vote since 1992.

Labouu, too, has its problems, owing to voters’ qualms about its fiscal stewardship and the sudden and remarkable collapse of the party in Scotland, long a Labour stronghold. But even some supporters of Mr. Cameron acknowledge that there now may be a more natural popular majority in the United Kingdom for the ideas and policies of Labour than for the Conservatives.

It wasn’t meant to be this way. Mr. Cameron assumed the leadership of his party a decade ago on a pledge to rebrand the Tories like former prime minister Tony Blair had changed the Labour Party in the 1990s.

“With Cameron and [George] Osborne [ now Chancellor of the Exchequer], we took the view that the Conservative Party had to modernize,” Steve Hilton, who was a Cameron adviser at the time, said in a recent interview. “That felt like a moment of change.”

The thinking was to apply conservative principles to a new set of problems, to express traditional views in a more modern way. Mr. Cameron embraced the issue of climate change through the principle of conservation. He announced his support for same-sex marriage in the context of stable relationships and strong families. He talked in the 2010 campaign about using government and the private sector to create a “Big Society” as a way to signal compassion and empathy.

Those efforts at reform were pushed back by a series of forces. One was the rise of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), whose nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-Europe message drained aggrieved voters away from the Conservatives. Determined to win back some of those defectors, the Tory message moved to the right — at a cost of alienating some voters they were trying to attract with the kinder and gentler appeal.

The other obstacle is the economic problems and deficits Mr. Cameron inherited from the last Labour government. Those realities necessitated austere fiscal policies that prevented more spending on some programs for the middle class, giving the party image a hard edge. The economy has improved but, as in the United States, the unequal distribution of those gains has left many feeling left out.