Where’s Reform? The 2026 Senedd election campaign so far

Richard Wyn Jones

I hate to have to admit it, but devolved election campaigns tend to be rather dull affairs. I’m not even convinced that they make much of a difference either.

The overwhelming majority of those intending to vote will almost certainly have decided who they will be supporting long before the familiar cycle of campaign launches, manifesto launches, and TV leadership debates get going.

Thus, while keen journalists will always seek to inject a sense of jeopardy – ‘Senedd campaign reaches crucial final stages!’ – and politicians and party activists will try their level best to impress potential voters, it’s all more ritualistic than genuinely substantive.

That doesn’t mean, though, that the campaigns are without interest. For one thing, we can glean quite a lot about the state of the political parties themselves by the way they approach the various tasks that they need to fulfil in order to play their full parts in the democratic process.

So, for example, Welsh Labour’s campaign for the last Senedd election in 2021 served to underscore just how complete was the hold of then First Minister, Mark Drakeford, on his party.

The strategic messaging as conveyed in the party’s election broadcasts and social media presence, the contents of the party’s manifesto: it was all pure Drakeford. Given how popular he was with the Welsh electorate at the time, it is understandable that quite a lot of the party’s campaign was about Drakeford too!

While it was his steady hand during the Covid crisis that was richly rewarded in the election that followed, at least the Welsh Labour campaign managed to reinforce rather than subtract from that.

Lacklustre 

Given that there are, as I write, still three weeks before polling day, it’s too soon to seek to draw any hard and fast conclusions from the nature of the campaigns for the 2026 Senedd election. Nonetheless – and while entering all necessary caveats – one thing has struck me forcibly about the campaign so far, and that is the weak and lacklustre nature of the Reform campaign.

Reform UK is, of course, the new kid on the block. Thus, even if it can draw on the experiences of its predecessor parties, and even if it’s now full of former Tories who can draw on their own previous experiences as Conservative activists, we might expect Reform to struggle to have all the building blocks in place to run a full-scale campaign.

Yet, Nigel Farage continues to talk up his party’s chances of emerging as the largest party in Wales after the 7th May and even of leading the next Welsh Government.

Farage might be right, of course. But so far at least – and bear in mind that postal votes will start to drop through letter boxes throughout Wales very shortly – the party’s Senedd election campaign seems to belie his confidence.

For one thing, where’s Reform UK’s ground game? More to the point perhaps, where’s the party’s social media campaign? After all, the kind of local organisation required to organise canvassing teams, distribute placards, and so on, takes time to build up. But social media campaigns can be commissioned and paid for centrally. All it requires is money and isn’t Reform meant to have plenty of that thanks to the crypto-infused largesse of the party’s friends?

Of course, it may be that Reform’s targeting is so finely tuned that I’m just not seeing anything because the party has decided that Welsh speaking academics are just not worth their time. If so, fair enough! But frankly, I doubt it.

Another explanation is that Reform decided at some point to de-prioritise Wales. Perhaps following its humiliating failure to win the Caerffili byelection despite – both metaphorically and apparently physically – blowing up the balloons for its victory party?

Or maybe there’s just less substance to Reform (so far, at least) than the media hype around Farage might have led us to believe. After all, it’s not just over the last few weeks that the party has flattered to deceive.

Despite claiming that it expected to win in Wales, it was only in February that it finally managed to unveil its First Minister candidate – the (still) almost completely unknown Dan Thomas. Subsequently, it was the last of the serious contenders to announce its slate of candidates for the election, with that announcement itself the source of some serious discontent within the party’s own ranks.

Does any of this matter? In terms of the 7th of May, as I’ve already suggested, probably not. But I suspect it does matter in terms of the ability of Reform to maintain a cohesive, effective Senedd group over the next four-year term – something that UKIP singularly failed to achieve after its breakthrough result in the 2016 devolved election. It almost certainly matters for Reform’s prospects in the local government elections in Wales in just over a year’s time.

While they may well tell us that it’s ‘Time for Reform’, on the evidence of the 2026 Senedd election campaign, Reform itself seems far from ready.

Professor Richard Wyn Jones is Director of the Wales Governance Centre at Cardiff University