Welsh Senedd elections are just a year away. We dig into Nigel Farage led party’s campaign to see if it can win power in Wales.
The WhatsApp group has become active, supporters are being emailed talking points, and party workers have been asked to gather for a meeting in a couple of weeks. A seat in the Welsh Senedd has never been this close to Gareth Beer and Reform UK’s grasp.
In last year’s general elections, Gareth came within a whisker of winning the Llanelli parliamentary constituency, a seat held by Labour for over a century. He lost to Nia Griffith by just over 1500 votes, marking a sharp increase in support from the Senedd elections of 2019 when his party barely managed to get two per cent of the support.
“We are on a roll, and people are excited,” says Gareth, who hopes to contest from Llanelli again as a Reform candidate. “Five years ago, during the last Senedd elections, no one had heard of Reform. How times have changed.”
But Gareth says he is not taking any chances.
“We have the momentum but there’s plenty to do. One year is not a lot of time and it’s when we go out that people realise what we are about,” he says.
Reform UK, the right-wing populist party led by Nigel Farage, has been surging in national opinion polls and believes it can win Welsh elections in May 2026.
Wales voted for Brexit in 2016, and the support for Farage’s party has since increased. It managed to get 17 per cent votes in last year’s national elections, and a December 2024 poll said it was just one percentage point behind Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru for Senedd elections. The poll said the right-wing party may win 23 per cent of votes, the same as Labour, which has been in power in the Welsh assembly since 1999.
Leaders of other Welsh parties have raised alarm over Reform’s rise. Earlier this month, Plaid Cymru’s leader in Westminster, Liz Saville Roberts, warned that Reform UK could win the next Senedd election if her party does not take them seriously. Meanwhile, the former first minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, warned that Labour must reclaim working people’s support to counter Farage’s message.
Seats like Llanelli are a key to Reform’s strategy. Once a part of the Welsh industrial heartland, the town is now a shadow of its glory days with barely any industries to sustain employment. A study by Carmarthenshire County Council, of which Llanelli is a part, found that over one-third of all households (28,730) in the area were living in relative poverty. The protests in October 2023 over the Home Office’s decision to house around 240 asylum seekers in a local hotel added to Reform’s support.
Gareth believes immigration is a hot-button issue which is out of control, but he needs to address local issues of joblessness and housing to win.
“If you go 10-20 years back, immigration was under control. People would come and assimilate… We don’t want any provocative language, but people should be able to talk. And then we can deal with the problems as they come, instead of letting it bottle up and causing mayhem.
“Llanelli is a poor area which is getting even more poorer. It’s economy, and it’s housing. Today, you need to have a fortune to get on the housing ladder,” he says.
Mobile and internet connectivity is another issue. Gareth says it is hard to get even 3G internet in the centre of the town.
“Where I am, you barely get 3G services. I was in a café in city’s centre for hours and couldn’t get the internet to work. It took forever. Sometimes, you are talking to someone on the phone, and it just cuts off,” he says.
For him, the solution to review the Welsh economy is to cut government waste and bring down taxes.
“We need to get the economy moving. The current labour government has put up taxes, our policy is to lower taxes,” he said.