The 2007 Welsh Assembly Election

The third election to the devolved National Assembly for Wales (NAW) took place on 3 May 2007. The election produced a result that was, on the surface at least, wholly unremarkable. The governing Labour Party, against a background of general unpopularity for the party across the UK, lost a small amount of ground; the main opposition parties made modest gains without enjoying any major breakthroughs. Yet, when the election result is examined in greater detail, the outcome looks far more interesting and suggests some significant and far-reaching consequences for Welsh politics. After briefly outlining the context within which the election took place, and summarizing the results, the article turns to consider the implications of the election in greater detail. The 2007 election may be most significant for providing further evidence of the decline of Labour Party dominance in Wales. Labour in Wales has enjoyed a sustained hegemony that has few parallels in the democratic world.1 But the 2007 election may well have marked the final fracturing of this hegemony, with both immediate consequences for the governance of Wales, as well as longer-term consequences for the establishment of a more genuinely competitive party politics within Wales.