By Michael Daventry
LONDON
Britain’s Liberal Democrats have elected a new leader who appears set to shift the party’s ideological focus to the left.
The social democrat Tim Farron is to replace former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who stepped down after the party’s disappointing showing in May’s general election.
Farron took 56.5 percent of the vote for the party leadership, defeating his only rival Norman Lamb, who had 43.5 percent
“Our job now is to turn millions of liberals throughout the U.K. into Liberal Democrats,” Farron tweeted shortly after the result was announced.
The party lost nearly all of its 56 MPs in the May election, widely described as punishment for its role in joining the center-right Conservatives in Britain’s first coalition this century.
Clegg praised his successor as a “remarkable campaigner and a man of the utmost integrity and conviction”, but senior figures have raised concerns that the Liberal Democrats under Farron might abandon political centrism and pursue a distinctly left-wing agenda.
Speaking at a meeting for party members organized by The Guardian newspaper last week, Farron said: “I think centrism is pointless. It’s uninspiring. I’m not a centrist.”
The comment caused alarm among some members of the party, which was formed as the result of a merger between the Liberals and Social Democrats in the 1980s.
A former finance minister, Danny Alexander, wrote in the New Statesman magazine this week that the Liberal Democrats should not abandon centrism and “envisage a future as a sort of soggy Syriza in sandals”.
But Alexander was one of many figureheads rejected by voters angry at his party for reversing its stance on its policies and supporting cutbacks to social welfare.
There are now just eight Liberal Democrat members in the new British parliament, whereas their Conservative coalition partners won their first majority in 23 years.
