Amid Uncertainty, Theresa May Calls for Stability
With elections putting her majority
in doubt, Prime Minister Theresa May declared that the Conservatives
would bring stability to Britain if they won the most seats in
Parliament.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS.
Photo by Frank Augstein/Associated Press.
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LONDON — Prime Minister Theresa May
of Britain suffered a major setback in a tumultuous election on
Thursday, losing her overall majority in Parliament and throwing her
government into uncertainty less than two weeks before it is scheduled
to begin negotiations over withdrawing from the European Union.
Mrs. May, the Conservative leader, called the snap election three years early, expecting to cruise to a smashing victory that would win her a mandate to see Britain through the long and difficult negotiations with European leaders over the terms of leaving the union.
But
according to results reported early Friday morning, the extraordinary
gamble Mrs. May made in calling the election backfired. She could no
longer command enough seats to avoid a hung Parliament, meaning that no party has enough lawmakers to establish outright control.
With
all but three of the 650 seats in the House of Commons accounted for,
the BBC reported that Mrs. May’s Conservatives would remain the largest
party. But they were projected to win only 318 seats, down from the 331
they won in 2015, and eight seats short of a majority.
Britons quickly started wondering whether Mrs. May would have to resign.
One
Conservative lawmaker, Anna Soubry, said on national television that it
had been a “dreadful campaign” and would force the prime minister to
“consider her position.”
The opposition Labour Party,
led by Jeremy Corbyn, was projected to be on track for 262 seats, up 30
from 2015, significantly elevating Mr. Corbyn’s standing after
predictions that his party would be further weakened.
“Whatever the final result, we have already changed the face of British politics,” Mr. Corbyn said.
Last
month, in an effort to show “just how much is at stake” in the
election, Mrs. May acknowledged that even a small loss of seats would
amount to a defeat.
“The
cold, hard fact is that if I lose just six seats, I will lose this
election, and Jeremy Corbyn will be sitting down to negotiate with the
presidents, prime ministers and chancellors of Europe,” she wrote in The Daily Mail.
But
early on Friday, Mrs. May hinted that her Conservative Party would try
to form a government even if it did not have a majority, arguing that
Britain needed “a period of stability.”
If the Conservative Party “has won the most seats and probably the most votes, then it will be incumbent on us,” she said.
The Scottish National Party
was projected to fall to 35 seats from 56, while the centrist Liberal
Democrats were projected to win 13 seats, up five from 2015.
The
forecast raised the prospect that neither major party would be able to
form a government without help from another party. If a coalition cannot
be formed, another election could be in the offing.
And
there was a wild card. Northern Ireland’s Sinn Fein party, which won
seven seats, said it would not occupy them, in keeping with its
longstanding policy. That would lower the threshold for Mrs. May’s party
to establish an effective majority.
The
former chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, said that for Mrs.
May losing a majority would be “completely catastrophic” for her and the
Conservative Party. But he added that it was also difficult to see how
the Labour Party could put together a coalition government.
“So it’s on a real knife edge,” he said.
Clearly,
Britons confounded expectations and the betting markets once again. The
uncertainty could complicate Britain’s exit from the European Union,
known as Brexit. Negotiations over the withdrawal are scheduled to start
in just 11 days. European leaders want a stable, credible British
government capable of negotiating, but Mrs. May’s plea to voters for a
strong mandate for Brexit failed badly.
The
official outcome of the vote may not be known until lunchtime on
Friday. But the British pound fell sharply after a national exit poll
showing that the Conservatives could lose their majority. Within seconds
of the exit poll’s release, the pound lost more than 2 cents against
the dollar, falling from $1.2955 to $1.2752.
Simon
Hix, a professor of political science at the London School of
Economics, said the projections showed the public’s resistance to the
complete break from Europe that Mrs. May has championed. Still, Mrs. May
was set to win, he asserted. “She hasn’t lost this election,” he said.
But
Steven Fielding, professor of political history at the University of
Nottingham, said that he was almost speechless at the projections. If
they held, he said, Mrs. May “is gone.”
“It’s
just a matter of time — even if they have a reduced majority,” he
continued. “She asked for a mandate, she expected a strong endorsement,
so her judgment is completely under question.”
“She was terrible in the campaign,” he added. “She is primarily the person who will be seen to be responsible for this.”
Kallum Pickering, a senior economist at Berenberg Bank in London, also suggested that Mrs. May was in trouble.
“Even
if May manages to cling on to a majority, we see a real risk that her
leadership is challenged, especially following an unsuccessful election
campaign that has managed to both weaken her personal credibility and
make far-left Labour leader Corbyn relevant again,” he said as the votes
were being counted.
Interactive Graphic
How Britain Voted
Results and analysis from the British general election.
Given the two terrorist attacks that took place during the campaign, security was tight on Thursday as Britons voted, with a heavy police presence.
Maria
Balas, 28, a waitress, said security was the prime issue. “England is
under attack and at this time we need a strong leader more than ever,”
Ms. Balas said after casting her vote for the governing Conservative
Party. “I don’t like Theresa May, and I wouldn’t have bothered to vote
if this election was all about giving her more power to take us into the
mess of Brexit, but now we are dealing with a security crisis and I
think she is the most qualified person in the running who can deal with
that.”
In London’s eastern borough of Hackney, however, young people seemed more concerned about future job prospects.
“The
Tories only care about the rich and their interests,” said Luke Wright,
26, who earns £7.50 an hour, or about $9.70, working at a stationery
shop. “If Labour won I’d have a chance to make more cash and get out of
this job that I’m overqualified for.”
Mrs. May, 60, rolled the dice on April 18
when she broke her promise not to call an early election, three years
ahead of schedule, but did so only because she believed the dice were
loaded in her favor.
She
went into this election with a 20-point lead in most polls and a
working majority of just 17 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons, the
lower house of Parliament.
While
she was personally against Britain’s exit from the European Union, or
Brexit, in the June 2016 referendum, the vote in favor caused David Cameron to resign, and she emerged as a kind of accidental prime minister.
But
she promised voters that she would honor the results of the referendum,
using her reputation for toughness “to get the best deal for Britain.”
Now,
her decision to call a snap election is raising comparisons to Mr.
Cameron’s decision to hold the referendum in the first place.
“May
is a policy politician; she does a very good job in office, and she is a
lousy campaigner,” said Robert Worcester, the founder of the MORI/Ipsos
polling and research organization. “There was just mistake after
mistake after mistake coming through.”
Mrs.
May pledged to curtail immigration, an effort to reach out to the
nearly 13 percent of voters in 2015 who voted for the U.K. Independence
Party, whose platform was anti-immigrant and pro-Brexit. Many of those
voters, especially in the West Midlands and the north, were
traditionally Labour supporters, but with the collapse of UKIP, many of
them were thought to lean to the Conservatives.
That
meant Labour-held seats seemed ripe for the picking, especially since
northerners were not enamored of Mr. Corbyn, 68, a far-left urbanite. He
seemed weak on defense and security, shaky on economic management and
passionate about places like Venezuela and Nicaragua, and had once had
strong sympathies for the Irish Republican Army and liked to make jam.
And
the centrist Liberal Democrats, who emphasized rerunning the Brexit
debate in a second referendum, were getting very little traction. While
the business elite were laser-focused on the issue of Britain’s future
relationship with the European Union, opinion polls showed that the
general population had moved beyond that and cared more about domestic
issues.
Strangely,
for such an important issue, the economic impact of Brexit barely
figured in this campaign, perhaps because its strongest effects, should
they materialize, will not be felt for some time.
Mrs.
May and the Conservatives ran an unusually personal campaign, trying to
emphasize the differences between her and Mr. Corbyn on questions of
leadership, reliability, economic competence and security, helped by the
rabidly anti-Corbyn, pro-Brexit tabloid press.
But
the Conservatives did not count on her poor performance on television
and shaky presence on the campaign trail, particularly when confronted
by hostile questioning. Rather than “strong and stable,” as her mantra
went, Mrs. May could seem brittle and querulous, repeating slogans
rather than dipping into substance.
Her
party’s manifesto was also vague on figures, and her effort to find
more funds for social benefits backfired when she announced, with little
consultation with her cabinet colleagues, her intention to charge the
better-off more for extended benefits, saying that old people could keep
assets up to 100,000 pounds, including the value of their homes.
Quickly labeled “the dementia tax,” it damaged her badly with the
Conservatives’ main supporters: older Britons.
“Theresa
May doesn’t look happy on the campaign trail,” said Mark Wickham-Jones,
professor of political science at the University of Bristol. “And
Labour have proved quite effective at chipping away at things like her
reluctance to debate.”
At
the same time, Mr. Corbyn, who survived an attempt last year by his own
members of Parliament to unseat him as Labour leader, had a very good
campaign. Appealing to the young, especially in the big cities, Mr.
Corbyn ran on a platform promising more social justice, free college
tuition, more money for the National Health Service and welfare, the
re-nationalization of the railways and utilities, and much higher taxes
on corporations and those earning over £80,000, about $104,000, a year.
His
performances on television were calm and avuncular, with a touch of
humor. And as the campaign wore on, he appeared to win back the support
of most Labour voters in 2015, plus some Liberal Democrats and Greens.
The
polls narrowed. But the Conservatives never lost their lead in any
major poll. And party professionals on the ground, especially in
marginal seats in the Midlands and the north that the Conservatives had
targeted, reported continuing resistance to Mr. Corbyn as a credible
prime minister.
The campaign was also marred by two terrorist attacks that caused numerous casualties, in Manchester on May 22 and then, last Saturday, in London.
These also seemed to work against Mrs. May, at least at first. As home
secretary for six years before becoming prime minister, she was
criticized for the security services’ failure to stop the plots and for
supporting cuts in beat policing.
Yet,
late polling indicated that she benefited from her tough response —
especially after the London attack, when she promised new
counterterrorism legislation — and had widened the gap with Labour at
the end.
The
candidates spent the last day of official campaigning racing around the
country — Mrs. May by jet, Mr. Corbyn by train. “They underestimated
us, didn’t they?” he told a rally in Glasgow.
Correction: June 8, 2017
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of
parliamentary seats held by the Scottish National Party heading into the
election. It was 56, not 59.
