Portugal’s Carla Barreto was re-elected by just one vote and after recounting ballots in Thursday’s municipal election in Thetford, despite not having qualified at district level.
Barreto was elected as an independent councilor in the constituency of Burrell for Thetford Borough, a local authority with more limited responsibilities than Breckland Borough, where she also unsuccessfully ran for Thetford Burrell’s area.
Thetford is a rural village with a population of almost 25,000, including several thousand Portuguese, who mainly work in the food industry in the region.
The Lusa bureau had reported on Friday that Carla Barreto had not been elected to ‘Breckland District Council’, but did not take into account the result of the vote for ‘Thetford Town Council’.
In the latter, the 44-year-old Portuguese won 385 votes, one more than Labor candidate Barry Sumner. of the 18 councillors [councillors] elected, ‘Labour’ won 13 places.
“I was about to not go in because despite counting the votes that was a bit of a saga. We were the last table, they had already dismantled everything, they had already put tables and chairs and only our table left (… ) to recount our votes until 8:00 pm,” Carla Barreto told Lusa.
“It got to the point where they said if it was a tie you flip a coin. [ao ar]because I think they’ve done that in the past,” he said.
After voiding the ballots “because they were not 100% clear”, and risking the result being suspended over the weekend and Monday bank holiday, the Labor Party accepted defeat by one vote of one of her candidates.
Overall, Barreto points out, he garnered more votes in the two elections than in 2019, when he contested municipal elections for the first time.
“This is positive for me because it means that people are already starting to know me, they’ve already seen my work over the past four years and if it weren’t for this giant wave of labor (…) I might have had more votes,” claimed .
Bearing in mind that she will be serving her second term, Carla Barreto could become the first non-British woman to be appointed ‘mayor’ of the city, in an area that voted ‘Brexit’ in the 2016 referendum.
Local elections were held on Thursday 4 May in 230 councils across England to fill some 8,000 local representative seats, the majority of which have so far been held by Conservatives.
Today, the only result yet to be determined was announced in the borough of Redcar and Cleveland after a third recount in one of the constituencies.
In the end, according to data collected by the BBC public channel, Labor won 2,675 of the approximately 8,000 seats contested, 537 more than in 2019, while the Conservatives lost 1,063, despite electing 2,296 councillors.
The Liberal Democrats, the fourth largest opposition party, also benefited from the ‘Tories’ shift, winning 407 new seats out of 1,628 seats secured.
The Greens counted 241 more of the 481 elected.
This was the last national election before the parliamentary elections scheduled for 2024, which the Labor Party, which has been in the opposition since 2010, hopes to win to return to power.
Source: DN
