Labour leader Ed Miliband must secure the vote of the ‘Aldi mum’ for a chance to become prime minister in the 2015 election, according to one of the party’s leading women.

Speaking at the Winning With Women conference this week, Caroline Flint, the shadow energy secretary, claimed the majority of Labour’s female voters, and even the middle class, are now just as likely to shop at Aldi as one of the big four supermarkets.

She may have a point, with the rise of the discounters showing no signs of fading. On last check, Aldi and Lidl both held on to respective record market shares of 3.7% and 3.1%, a combined share larger than The Co-operative, while more than 40% of price-conscious Brits are now said to shop, to an extent, at one of the discounters [Kantar].

“Price-conscious, financially insecure, struggling with rising food costs and soaring energy bills, Aldi Mum is an unashamed bargain-hunter who stocks up on the basics at the supermarket but opts for Aldi for the Parma ham and prosecco,” Flint told delegates.

In the build-up to the election, Flint insists her door will be very much open to the concerns of Aldi’s shoppers.

“Today, people are struggling and think no political party understands what life is like for them, let alone knows how to improve things and that is why so much of what we do between now and [the election] will be focused on issues that the Aldi Mum is actually talking about.”

Speaking after securing the top spot for The Grocer Supermarket Loyalty League for 2012/2013, Matthew Barnes, joint MD of Aldi UK, said: “Our customers know they can get everyday low prices when they shop at Aldi and that is why they keep on coming back.”

And Flint says that level of loyalty is something Labour will now look to utilise itself by pulling off price cuts in areas including energy and property.

Meanwhile, consider how painful it must be for Asda to have Flint name-check the Aldi Mum instead of its own brand. The retailer takes great pride in presenting its monthly Mumdex report, a survey of 5,500 Asda mums –the latest of which revealed that almost a third of those polled had already started saving for Christmas. That’s a retail opportunity the likes of Aldi and Lidl are sure to be monitoring.

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