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Conservatives lose majority, prompting calls for May’s resignation.
Prime minister’s gamble on snap election backfires: ‘She’s in a very difficult place’
A projection based on final results in most districts showed Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservatives seven seats short of keeping their majority, while Labour was forecast to pick up dozens of seats.
May has decided against stepping down and probably will try to form a coalition government.
But it was not guaranteed that May would be allowed to stay on, given that the results represented a catastrophic outcome for Tories.
- The Conservative Party will try to form a minority government with help from a party in Northern Ireland.
- Theresa May, high on good polling and anxious to unify her party behind a “hard Brexit” (involving leaving the EU’s trade and immigration agreements), called a snap election in spring in the name of selecting a Brexit negotiating team. [The Atlantic / Samuel Earle]
- But Brexit really wasn’t the topic of the election. Instead — after the Conservatives floated, then backpedaled on, a proposal to have seniors pay part of their medical care that was called the “dementia tax” — it became an election about social services in Britain. And that primed many voters, especially young people, to Labour and Jeremy Corbyn, who promised more funding to the National Health Service and tuition-free college. [NME / Mike Williams]
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| Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain addressed the news media outside 10 Downing Street in London on Friday, announcing plans to form a minority government. Tim Ireland/Associated Press |
Minority governments tend to be fragile and short-lived, and many expect that Mrs. May will be a lame-duck prime minister, that she may not last as long as a year and that she will not lead her party into another election.
For European Union leaders, who were expecting her to emerge with a reinforced majority, the uncertainty is unwelcome, especially as they try to prioritize issues such as climate change and their relationship with an unpredictable and unfriendly President Trump. There is also resentment that, once again, the British have complicated things out of political hubris and partisan self-interest.
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Without question now, Britain is not ready for the negotiations, having spent the past year largely avoiding a real debate on the topic, other than a vague argument over the merits of a “hard Brexit” (as a clean break from the European Union is known), versus a “soft Brexit,” which would require more compromise.
An Upheaval Just as ‘Brexit’ Talks Begin
Mrs May faced open calls from her own MPs to 'consider her position' while a jubilant Jeremy Corbyn demanded she make way for him to become PM. But an ashen-faced Mrs May insisted the Conservatives were still the largest party with an expected 318 seats. She insisted the country needed a 'period of stability', adding: 'It is incumbent on us to ensure that we have that.' As the knives came out for Mrs May, former chancellor George Osborne lambasted her campaign performance as 'wooden' and her manifesto as a disaster, making clear he did not believe she could survive for long.
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| Daniel Leal-Olivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
The far-left firebrand, who many believed was headed for political oblivion, vastly outperformed expectations.Labour, under Jeremy Corbyn, ran what political analysts regard as an excellent and optimistic campaign, promising an end to austerity, more money for health and social welfare and free tuition
- Corbyn is something of a throwback to the quasisocialist Labour Party of the 1970s — he wants to nationalize several industries. And he’s been a pretty dysfunctional leader of the party in Parliament. But many outsiders like him — he was elected because of a surge of new Labour Party members who joined to vote for him — which might have provided the motivation boost to spur the party toward a better-than-expected performance Thursday. [BBC Newsnight / Stephen Bush]
“He’s had a brilliant campaign,” said Chuka Umunna, a senior member of the Labour Party who was among those openly disgruntled with Mr. Corbyn’s leadership last year. “Jeremy has fought this campaign with enthusiasm, energy, verve, has clearly loved being surrounded in the mix with people. That’s what politics is all about.”
And a striking contrast to Mrs. May, who was roundly criticized as wooden, robotic and manifestly uncomfortable when meeting voters.
When the election campaign started last month, few took the 68-year-old Mr. Corbyn seriously. But his unorthodox path fits a broader pattern of outsiders and, some would say, populists who are shaking up the political center in Western countries from left and right.
A five-time winner of the parliamentary beard of the year, Mr. Corbyn is Britain’s Bernie Sanders, another grizzled firebrand who inspired a generation of young voters to become politicized and, at least this week, turn out to vote. Mr. Corbyn’s fans call themselves Corbynistas.
Some already say that with his rejection of free-market economics and his quiet but more compromising approach to Britain’s exit from the European Union, he might not just change the Labour Party but also shift British politics more broadly.
Mr. Corbyn is a different type of politician, one happier on the campaign trail speaking to fellow activists through a megaphone than debating in the neo-Gothic splendor of the British Parliament with its arcane rules and obscure traditions.
In 2015, after more than three decades as a lawmaker, he had to be persuaded to stand for the party leadership, agreeing only reluctantly and in order to enable the left to present a candidate. No one, not even Mr. Corbyn himself, expected him to win. If ever there were an accidental leader, he is it.
During his 34 years in Parliament, Mr. Corbyn has essentially been in permanent opposition, not just to Mrs. May’s Conservative Party but also to his own Labour Party. He voted against the Iraq invasion, has opposed successive attempts to roll back civil liberties in the fight against terrorism and has long argued against deregulation and free-market reforms.
The biggest problem, he has said, is that since Margaret Thatcher established neoliberalism as the dominant economic consensus in Britain in the 1980s, Labour allowed the Conservatives to set the agenda on the economy and never offered an alternative narrative.
Mr. Corbyn offered that alternative: Under the banner of “For the Many Not the Few,” he vowed to nationalize the railroads, make universities free again and inject billions into the National Health Service by raising taxes on companies and the top 5 percent of income earners.
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The causes that he has been passionate about are many, including the rights of Palestinians and South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. But he has also come under fire for showing sympathy over the years to the Irish Republican Army and Hamas, the militant group ruling Gaza that is dedicated to eradicating Israel.
He and his inner circle have been accused of anti-Semitism for their strong criticism of Israel; of a latent anti-Americanism; of wanting to do away with Britain’s nuclear deterrent policy; and of being lukewarm toward NATO — accusations that he denies.
All of that faded into the background on Friday.
Mr. Corbyn, said Mr. Steven Fielding, a professor of political history at the University of Nottingham. “has rewritten the rules, but he hasn’t won.” The question, he added, was “how viable is a Corbyn approach to winning power, rather than doing well in defeat?”
With his core vote for now still far to the left of Middle England, Mr. Corbyn seems unlikely ever to run Britain.