UPDATED: 2:15 p.m. BST, Sept. 12
Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the UK's Labour Party on Saturday, beating out more mainstream rivals and marking a turn left for the party, which has been moving toward the centre for decades.
Corbyn won with a solid lead in the first round of voting, with 59.5% of the 422,664 votes cast. The 66-year-old socialist, who has been the MP for London's Islington North since 1983, beat Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall.
He faces the challenge of uniting a deeply divided Labour Party. Most of the MPs in the party have misgivings about him, and a few of the most experienced members of the party have already quit the shadow cabinet since his election.
Corbyn is well-known as a socialist and his politics are left-leaning. He has said Britain can learn from Karl Marx, and that the philosopher was a "great observer" of human life and society.
Corbyn wants to end austerity, have higher taxes on the rich, renationalise railways and energy companies, and withdraw from NATO. He wants Britain to stay in the EU but says he's not happy with the current state of Europe.
Corbyn started out the contest as a long shot after the exit of Ed Miliband, under whose leadership Labour lost the general election to the Conservatives on May 7.
But he rose in popularity in the polls as his generally young supporters embraced his ideas as a breath of fresh air. His followers rallied around #JezWeCan.
Jeremy Corbyn arrives for leadership announcement to supporters' chants of "Jez We Can" pic.twitter.com/V2tQimVIdn— Joe Churcher (@JoeChurcher) September 12, 2015
The surge in enthusiasm for Corbyn led many newcomers to the party to pay £3 to sign up to vote in the leadership contest. The sudden leap in the membership rolls led some MPs to claim that Conservatives and "hard left" sympathisers were infiltrating the party, but Labour said they were weeding out bogus claims.
In the election, voters ranked candidates in order of preference. If no candidate had won 50% of the vote, the person in last place would be dropped and it would proceed to another round until there was a winner.
On Friday, Sadiq Khan, former shadow justice secretary, won Labour’s nomination for the London mayoralty race in May 2016. The Guardian said the results underline Labour’s recent shift to the left.
Some reporting by The Associated Press.