Jeremy Corbyn says he got successful election ideas from Bernie Sanders

'Bernie called me the day after our election here...I was half-asleep watching something on TV'

Britain's opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn talks to the media in Brussels (Reuters)

The Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has credited the US's Bernie Sanders with some of his social democratic campaign planks, telling the writer Naomi Klein that he embraced comparisons with the Vermont senator.

“Bernie called me the day after our election here,” Mr Corbyn said in an interview published Thursday by the Intercept. “I was half-asleep watching something on television. And Bernie comes on to say, well done on the campaign, and I was interested in your campaigning ideas. Where did you get them from? And I said, well, you, actually.”

Mr Corbyn, who won the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015 and held it after a 2016 challenge, has frequently been cited by Mr Sanders as an example of how left politics can win. This year, a snap election that began with predictions about Mr Corbyn driving Labour into the wilderness ended with a series of surprise gains, and Prime Minister Theresa May clinging to power in a controversial deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party. According to a post-election analysis by Ipsos Mori, over half of eligible British voters under age 30 turned out — double the youth turnout rate in some American elections. That led to surprising Labour gains in cities with large universities, with student turnout overturning large Conservative majorities.

“There’s a lesson to be learned from what Corbyn did in the UK,” said Mr Sanders in a recent interview with The Washington Post. “The remarkable thing about his election — and he did better than I did — was that among younger people, the voter turnout was as high as it was among the general population. That was unprecedented.”

In recent elections, Democrats have succeeded in pushing up youth turnout just twice — when Barack Obama was on the ballot. In 2010 and 2014, youth turnout plunged. And in this year’s special elections, youth turnout edged up only slightly. In Jon Ossoff’s near-miss bid for Georgia’s 6th congressional district, 17.2 per cent of the electorate consisted of millennials. That was up from 14 per cent in the race’s April primary — but millennials made up 25 per cent of all eligible voters.

“If we can take the voter turnout in this country from 60 per cent to 70 per cent, which is where it was in the UK, and bring young people into the electoral process, Democrats would win a landslide victory,” said Mr Sanders.

(C) Washington Post