The pulsating beating of a dance floor grew up to a thunderous tone and the crowd got up. The beams of light flashed through the bullshit Arena of Birmingham, in the central England. Then, in the end, Nigel Farage, the right -wing populist leader who claims to be able to correct a “broken Britain”, arrived on stage, taking a ride on a drop.
Farage, which guides the anti-immigration party reform UK, has long been one of the most ardent supporters of Great Britain of President Trump. He also learned from the tactics of the president's campaign.
This means, among other things, that the political event has returned to Great Britain.
In the weeks before the municipal elections and special elections in England on May 1, Farage was on tour in the country, climbing on the stage of Cornwall, Darlington and Hull, smiling widely, making jokes and railings against “illegal immigrants”, which promises to deport.
Since he returned to the helm of the reform last year and then he was elected British legislator for the first time, Farage has led the party of the insurgents to an extraordinary company in the polls. He won 14 percent of the votes last July, but now he was regularly probe about 25 percent, overcoming the main opposition conservatives and, in some surveys, the Government Labor Party.
Thursday elections, although limited in numbers, are the first reform capacity test to convert that survey in power. Analysts provide that the party emerges with hundreds of municipal seats and two regional mayors. It is also favored to win special elections fought closely for a parliamentary polling station on the same night.
Mr. Farage is a charismatic and fluent speaker who, like Mr. Trump, embraces a “USA-Vetro” rhetoric when it comes to immigrants without documents and other political parties. His gatherings are distinguished in a country where most of the politics has long been from public speech to TV and now to social media.
British politicians tend to face large crowds now only during the electoral campaigns or in their annual party conferences. Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of The Labor Party, was a remarkable exception in 2017 when he spoke at the Glastonbury Music Festival and was serenely serenched by the participants in the Conccert.
“The gatherings came out of political fashion,” said Neil Kinnock, who led the work from 1983 to 1992, and was one of the most skilled speakers of his era. He was famous for his platform speeches, including his 1983 warning against the conservative of the vote and his passionate complaint of the left in 1985. He was also mentioned in Great Britain as an example of the dangers of the oratory: a demonstration of the arena that he held before the 1992 elections was seen by some critics as contributing to the defeat of the work that year, although the proofs of polls contradict the theory.
Mr. Kinnock is not a fan of Mr. Farage's speeches. “When I'm condescending – sorry – I think so as a chat of the lounge bar from behind a microphone,” he said. “But with the right audience it is certainly effective.”
The reform rally formula declared Kinnock, includes a lot of noise, speakers to heat the crowd, therefore “a crescendo Farage”, in which the leader “is projected as a sort of Everyman's Messiah”. The rallies are “not dissimilar from Trump”, he observed, with “repetitive themes, some unconceptions, with phrases that like the public; references to immigration and to his alleged consequences are unmissable”.
Sometimes the sorceress of Mr. Trump have attracted tens of thousands in large outdoor places. They present a soundtrack of one blow (“Ymca”, of the people of the village, is a standard), as well as provocative and pleasant moments to the crowd, such as when Mr. Trump underlines the TV cameras and journalists on the back of the Arena and label them “False news”.
These theatricals played a fundamental role in Trump's political increase, according to Stephen K. Bannon, who was the CEO of the campaign of Mr. Trump 2016.
“When that movable scale in New York went down and went to Iowa two days later, we had nothing,” said Bannon, referring to June 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy. “The gatherings have become everything. The Trump campaign was essentially a series of rallies.”
After Brexit's vote in 2016, Bannon said that the campaign recognized the pharage value as a heating act. In August of that year, Mr. Farage appeared alongside Mr. Trump in a sorceress event in Jackson, Miss.
Brexit was the “Day of Britain's independence”, said Farage, while Mr. Trump smiled and applauded.
“We perforated Brexit in people's heads,” said Bannon. “When we had come to Nigel, it was a rock star among the faithful of Maga. You must have someone with charisma. He is also a fun boy, like Trump.”
At the Birmingham event, the reform had built a stage set destined to symbolize an impoverished nation, including a mound of garbage bags (a clear reference to the garbage strike in the city), a bus covered covered with graffiti and a closed pub.
Mr. Farage attacked the zero net objectives of the government and promised that a reform government would “get rid of the human rights law” and expel migrants without documents. “Let me tell you, all those who come illegally will be expelled, end of history,” he said, to the noisiest whoops and greetings of the night.
Birmingham was not – as had been promised – the greatest political manifestation of modern British history. The party said it sold about 10,000 tickets but there were hundreds of empty seats. Yet by attracting thousands of people, some hundreds of miles, to a political event, Mr. Farage has achieved something that no other British party has recently tried.
He has already kept gatherings in the critical moments of a long political career in which he led three parts and made a campaign for Brexit. In 2016, just before the referendum in which Great Britain voted to leave the European Union, Farage turned to the supporters of Gateshead in North England -Eastern, supporting a loading reading: “We want to return our country”.
Last year, his arrival at an event in Clacton-on-Sea, which he now represents in Parliament, was marked by pyrotechnics and a song by Eminem who exploded: “Guess who is back, returning again?”
In the Birmingham Arena, Caroline Woodman, 61 years old, from Leigh on Sea, a city of the Assex for more than two hours of cars from the headquarters, said it wanted lower immigration, higher standards of living and to “get rid of participation”. Unable to work while waiting for a foot operation, Mrs. Woodman, a teacher, said she grew up in a family supporting family but voted for Mr. Farage for more than two decades.
“I know he is an honest, respectful and kind person who would have put our country first and will take care of the people,” he said.
Gary Jackson, 56, from East Yorkshire, is a retired police commander. Previously he had voted conservative, but now he expects Mr. Farage to be the next Prime Minister. “I don't know any other politician who replies straight like him,” he said.
Robert Hayward, a conservative member of the Lord Chamber and an expert on polls, said that the rallies were galvanizing the supporters necessary to build reforming the United Kingdom in a party at national level that could challenge the work in 2028 or 2029, when Britain will hold the general elections.
“It establishes a sense of momentum by bringing together all these people,” said Hayward. “No other party at the moment could do something like that.”