GALLOWS humour prevails among Liberal Democrats. “I didn’t expect it to be a wondrous romp to 325 seats and an overall Liberal Democrat majority,” jokes Tim Farron, the party’s former president and now a candidate for its leadership, of its collapse from 56 to just eight MPs at the general election. Norman Lamb, his rival, observes that the leadership race, which ends on July 16th, “is an election which at last a Liberal Democrat is going to win”. Neither man struggled to obtain the nominations of 10% of his parliamentary colleagues required to make the ballot paper—which, as party staff grimly note, meant each needed the support of fully 0.8 MPs.

If the Lib Dems seem punch drunk, that is understandable: after five difficult years as junior coalition partners to the Conservatives, on May 7th the party lost two-thirds of its votes and many parliamentary seats that it had held for decades. On the verge of tears, Nick Clegg, its leader, resigned on the morning after the election.

But the race to replace him matters despite the scale of the party’s defeat, because—though reduced—the Lib Dems remain a significant force. David Cameron has a small majority and a rebellious party; he may yet look to his former governing partners for support in crucial votes. The Lib Dems also retain a large presence in the House of Lords. And how they respond to the election also affects the Labour Party, with which they compete for left-liberal votes. In their two leadership candidates, Lib Dems face a choice between two starkly different paths.

The favourite is Mr Farron, who would draw a line under the Clegg years. Long sceptical of his party’s dealings with the Tories (even before the election he gave its handling of coalition a score of two out of ten), he was never a minister and defied it on several thorny policies, most notably opposing the increase in university tuition fees that many reckon later contributed to the party’s collapse at the polls. Folksy but capable of rabble-rousing—he once described Margaret Thatcher’s government as “organised wickedness”—he embodies the leftist piety that delivered the party strong election results under Mr Clegg’s predecessors.