It has been frustrating to me, as a politics student from Wales, to see that coverage of the Senedd elections has been nationally overlooked in favour of local elections in England and the Holyrood elections. This is especially true for the Welsh Liberal Democrats, whose modest outcome of holding our only seat has hardly been discussed at all, both by leadership and its members.

The poor performance is the latest stage in a two-decade pattern of contraction that the party has consistently failed to fix. At devolution in 1999, the Welsh Liberal Democrats won six seats and entered government as a coalition partner, with Mike German serving as Deputy First Minister. They held six seats across the next two elections, in 2003 and 2007. Post-coalition, Welsh Lib Dem presence collapsed to five seats in 2011, and a single seat in 2016 which they retained in 2021 only by switching from a constituency to a regional list-seat. In 2026, the party holds one seat in a chamber that has grown from 60 to 96 members, meaning their proportional presence is smaller now than at any point since devolution began.

Internal party messaging attributes our underperformance to the “tough new electoral system” under the new d’Hondt system; I believe that this is an unfair characterisation of Welsh voters. Voters in Wales were not attracted to the Liberal Democrats due to an underdeveloped strategy, and a failure to communicate their strong governing record within Wales. Both issues are symptomatic of what could happen to the Lib Dems at the next GE if they fail to create a national strategy to secure votes, as opposed to the targeted seat strategy that has allowed us to win FPTP seats in Westminster and local councils.

A major error of the Senedd campaign was their decision to place opposition to Welsh independence at the centre of the party’s manifesto – literally titled ‘A Stronger Wales in a Stronger UK’. Although this position is consistent with the Liberal Democrats’ longstanding commitment to federalism, its salience within the Welsh political context is comparatively low.

While it likely secured them some votes in Brecon and Radnor, where opposition to independence is markedly higher than in much of Wales, survey data consistently indicates that Welsh voters prioritise issues of health, poverty, and the cost of living over independence. We were also aligned with more right-wing parties on this issue, to some detriment; any voter for whom unionism is an absolute and non–negotiable priority was, in the current political landscape, more likely to vote for the Conservatives or Reform UK. In this context, our emphasis on unionism was unsuccessful as it had a low issue salience and was unlikely to mobilise new support for the party.

The party’s focus on this is particularly frustrating given that the Welsh Liberal Democrats had a demonstrable governing record that went mostly uncommunicated. As the sole opposition MS whose support was required to pass the Welsh Government’s budget, Jane Dodds had successfully extracted many policy concessions from Welsh Labour. In February 2025, a deal worth more than £100m secured £1 bus fares for all 16 to 21–year–olds across Wales – a genuinely progressive and visible intervention in the cost–of–living pressures facing young people. The success of the scheme is evidence that Welsh Liberal Democrats, even if small, had been making major impacts within Wales. In the same period, they also achieved a ban on greyhound racing, additional funding for universal childcare, and the protection of the Heart of Wales rail line.

These successes should have been leveraged to demonstrate the party’s effectiveness, yet none of this appears to have reached the electorate. While canvassing in Brycheiniog Tawe Nedd, I repeatedly encountered Lib Dem-voting households who could not name a single policy we had delivered in the Senedd. Many of those voters were also habitual tactical voters, which meant their support was never guaranteed. Under a more proportional system, they needed to see the Liberal Democrats as a credible option rather than the least-worst vote to block the extremes of Plaid Cymru or Reform UK.

This is a failure of communication that also extended directly into the manifesto itself. Published on April 14th – the last of the major parties to release theirs – the Welsh Liberal Democrat manifesto was financially ambitious, committing to £300m for social care, fully funded childcare from nine months for 30 hours a week across 48 weeks of the year, and a £400m town centres fund. However, these commitments were not accompanied by any published costing.

The absence of published costings was not unique to the Liberal Democrats; the Institute for Fiscal Studies judged all six major parties gave insufficient details about how their proposals for Wales would be funded. However, the Welsh Liberal Democrats occupied a uniquely exposed financial position by being the only party proposing to increase Welsh income tax; a 1p increase on income tax as an emergency measure to fund social care. In isolation, this was a defensible and principled position; social care in Wales is chronically underfunded to the point of acute crisis. In a period of major cost-of-living anxieties, the policy was vulnerable to criticism. More populist campaigns run by the Conservatives and Reform UK pledged to cut Welsh income tax; these were successful with voters despite being incompatible with the fiscal realities of Wales. This is not an argument against the policy itself, but it shows that such policies were not attractive to voters already financially constrained.

As a smaller, regional party within a federal system, the Welsh Liberal Democrats are almost entirely reliant on the centre of the party for their policy development and finances. Our focus on winning ‘targeted’ seats in southern England has delivered real gains for us since 2024, but has left Wales without the sustained policy investment or financial infrastructure that a serious Senedd campaign requires. Without the support of the national party, Jane Dodds was left to carry the entire Welsh campaign largely alone; this was a considerable burden for any politician, and an unreasonable one for a leader also juggling the roles as an MS of the largest constituency in Wales, and the sole Lib Dem within the Senedd.

It feels almost contradictory to the nature of the Liberal Democrats as a federal party, and as a party that believes in greater devolved powers across Britain to neglect the Welsh party in this way. It is also short-sighted of the national party to dismiss the Senedd results as the unfortunate by-product of the new electoral system, especially during a period when the party seeks to re-evaluate their values and electoral strategy ahead of our 2026 Conference, and the next General Election itself.

If the Liberal Democrats are serious about being a national party rather than a collection of winnable southern English seats, the work of building that credibility must begin in the places where they are not necessarily primed to win. Wales – a traditional liberal foothold – should be the first step.

* Elsie Jones is a Liberal Democrat member and a Welsh Young Liberal.