In a vote of 50 to 1, the Welsh Parliament has enacted legislation that criminalises false statements during election campaigns and introduces a recall system to remove misbehaving politicians but the law won’t take effect until 2030 at the earliest.
In a vote that has reverberated well beyond the borders of this small nation on the western edge of Britain, the Welsh Parliament passed a landmark law on March 17 making it illegal for politicians to lie during election campaigns the first legislation of its kind anywhere in the world.
The Welsh Parliament, known as the Senedd, passed the law by 50 votes to one, paving the way for a new criminal offence covering false or misleading statements of fact intended to help an election candidate. The legislation also introduces a recall mechanism allowing voters to remove politicians from parliament between elections for serious misconduct, a provision that, combined with the lying ban, represents the most ambitious attempt by any democracy to legislate political honesty in the modern era.
The breakthrough was not without resistance. The law was agreed despite warnings from some legislators that its powers could limit free speech and hinder democratic debate during election periods. And in practical terms, its reach is limited: the law would not come into effect until 2030 at the earliest, and will not apply to Wales’s elections scheduled for May 2026.
For the past two years, the Welsh Parliament has been grappling with how to tackle deliberate lying by politicians and how to rebuild public trust in democracy. There is broad agreement across parties that the current system offers almost no real consequences for dishonesty. As one Senedd member put it bluntly: “Lying flourishes in politics because we can get away with it.”
That candid admission captures the frustration that drove the legislation forward. Polling by Opinium found that 73% of voters support criminalising politicians who lie to the public, while a separate Ipsos survey found that just 9% of people in the United Kingdom trust elected officials to tell the truth, a 40-year low. Some 45% say they “almost never” trust governments of any party to put the country ahead of political interests.
The bill’s long-standing champion, Adam Price former leader of the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru has described the legislation as globally unprecedented. When the Welsh government first committed to the bill in 2024, Price declared that Wales would become the first country to insist politicians and candidates are legally obliged to tell the truth, adding that “lying in politics has for too long been normalised.”
It is important to be precise about what Wales has and has not done. The bill does not introduce a general ban on politicians lying once they are elected and in office. Instead, it focuses narrowly on statements made during election campaigns, giving Welsh ministers the power to create a new criminal offence for false or misleading statements intended to influence election outcomes.
For sitting members of parliament found to have deliberately lied, a separate system applies. The Standards Commissioner would investigate and decide if a Senedd Member has deliberately lied. If found guilty, members could be issued with a correction notice requiring them to correct the record in a place with equal prominence to where the false statement was originally made for example, on the same social media account used to publish the initial claim. Members who fail to comply would be considered in breach of the rules and subject to a sanction.
The recall mechanism is equally significant. A new system to remove and replace Senedd Members found guilty of serious breaches of the Code of Conduct will be introduced, giving the public the opportunity to remove politicians who have misbehaved between elections.
Not everyone is convinced the law is workable or even desirable. Vian Bakir, a professor of journalism and political communications at Bangor University, acknowledged that politicians are widely seen as major sources of online misinformation, but warned that a legal ban risks chilling legitimate political debate. “Politicians should be allowed to get things wrong,” she said, adding that many political issues have no clear factual answer.
Some Senedd members, including within the governing Labour party, warned that Wales risks rushing through legislation that may feel symbolically satisfying but is legally flawed. One member cautioned against passing “bad law in a poor way” simply to “make people feel good.”
The thorniest question is one of definition. Mark Frankel, head of public affairs at the fact-checking organisation Full Fact, noted that determining whether a statement is legally false is often harder than it appears. “Many statements can be partially true or simply missing context,” he said, warning that demonstrating intent adds yet another layer of legal complexity and that the law could push disputes into the criminal justice system.
Despite its limitations, the Welsh law has captured the world’s attention precisely because no other democracy has attempted it. Constitutional barrister Dr Sam Fowles, who advised Price throughout the bill’s development, argued that truth-telling is essential to democracy and that politicians should be held to the same standards of honesty already imposed on lawyers and doctors. “As voters we should be entitled to rely on the statements made by our elected representatives,” he said. “This seems to me to be long overdue.”
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For observers across the African continent where disinformation during elections has triggered violence, undermined democratic transitions, and eroded public trust from Sierra Leone to Kenya the Welsh experiment raises a question that is neither abstract nor academic: if a small nation of three million people can pass a law making political lying a criminal act, what excuse do larger, older democracies have for continuing to treat it as an acceptable norm?
