Far-left lawmaker elected leader of Labor Party

LONDON — Jeremy Corbyn’s stunning transformation from perennial leftist rebel to leader of Britain’s Labor Party upended British politics on Saturday and delivered a striking message worldwide: At this antiestablishment moment, parties of the left are just as vulnerable to populist takeovers as parties of the right.

The Corbyn victory represented an extraordinary rebuke to Labor’s more centrist powers-that-be, especially to former prime minister Tony Blair, who had campaigned vigorously against Corbyn and who argued that his selection would mean the party’s “annihilation.”

But interventions from Blair and other party heavyweights apparently did little to halt Corbyn’s momentum and may have backfired.

As the summer campaign progressed, the former union organizer evolved from a fringe candidate who barely made it on the ballot to a grass-roots phenomenon who, whitehaired and rumpled at 66, stirred the passions of a new generation of Labor activists.

Corbyn’s rise echoes that of another socialist who has come out of nowhere this year to rattle his party’s establishment. Like Corbyn, Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, has been waging a surprisingly effective insurgency.

“If you’re Bernie Sanders, you’ll take some heart from this,” said Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University of London. “If you’re Hillary Clinton, you’ll be nervous.”

While Sanders is still fighting uphill in his effort to outmaneuver Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Corbyn’s once-quixotic-seeming campaign ended on Saturday with a landslide win. Nearly 60 percent of voters backed him over three more centrist rivals just four months after Labor suffered one of its worst-ever defeats in national elections.

In a fiery victory speech, Corbyn vowed to combat society’s “grotesque inequality” and make Britain a more humane country.

“We don’t have to be unequal,” Corbyn, looking professorial in spectacles and an open-collar blue shirt, told supporters at a London conference center. “It doesn’t have to be unfair. Poverty isn’t inevitable. Things can — and they will — change.”

But within minutes of the results being announced, half a dozen prominent Labor politicians said they would not serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, the opposition party’s main vehicle for challenging the government’s policies.