Electoral pacts: which parties might do a deal at the next election?

If 2024 was the year of the Labour landslide, 2025 was the year that the smaller parties were on the rise with potentially huge ramifications for the next election.

Polls say that voters are “deserting Labour and the Tories” so talk of election deals is “becoming more urgent”, said The i Paper. The two main parties are losing supporters to smaller ones like Reform UK and the Green Party, fuelling predictions that tactical voting “may decide the next general election, due in 2029”.

Green Party leader Zack Polanski is among the few apparently willing to formalise a pact. Here are some of the possible options.

Tory-Reform

Nigel Farage has denied claims from unnamed Reform UK donors in the Financial Times that he expects an electoral pact or a merger between his party and the Conservatives before the next general election.

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Such a move would represent a historic realignment on the right of British politics, but Farage said he is in fact aiming for a “reverse takeover” of the Conservatives. “A deal with them as they are would cost us votes,” he said.

Kemi Badenoch has also ruled out the idea. But “there are posh Southern seats where Reform can’t win, and working-class seats where the Tories can’t win”, said The Telegraph. While there is unlikely to be any “formal arrangement”, each party “quietly standing aside” in certain constituencies “makes sense”.

Green-Labour

The Greens are eyeing a “pact” with Labour to “shut out Farage”, two senior party officials told Politico. The arrangement, which would “stop short” of a “formal” deal, would be “tapping into tactical voting”. The Greens are “discussing the prospect of informal, local prioritisations of resources so the best-placed progressive challenger can win”.

But Labour is “keen to tamp down talk of working together”. A senior government adviser said Labour is “not even thinking about” working with Polanski. There’s “scepticism” that a “non-aggression deal” would work, because the Greens will be “vying for the kind of urban heartlands Labour can’t afford to back down from”.

Lib Dem-Labour

The Liberal Democrats and Labour have teamed up in the past, in 1903, 1924, 1929 and 1977. The question of them uniting again for a “common national project” has been “asked repeatedly, in various guises and circumstances, for more than 100 years”, said Martin Kettle in The Guardian.

But what about now? Would Lib Dem leader Ed Davey work with Labour? “Everyone knows he would,” said The Independent, but “everyone also knows he can’t say so”.

There are “very few” Commons seats where the two parties “compete directly these days”, said Emma Burnell on Labour List. A “judicious use of resources at the next general election (from both sides) will probably keep it that way".