Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced new elections in Great Britain for July 4th. Parliament is due to be dissolved next week. Sunak’s party faces a historic defeat in the elections.
The next general election in Great Britain will take place on July 4th. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made the announcement on Wednesday after summoning his cabinet to a meeting in London. Parliament is due to be dissolved next week. In the vote, Sunak’s Conservatives face a devastating defeat against Keir Starmer’s Labor Party.
Uncertain times require a clear plan and bold action, said the conservative head of government in pouring rain. He has this plan, unlike the opposition Labour Party. Only a conservative government led by him will stabilize the economy, said Sunak.
According to polls, the Social Democrats are around 20 percentage points ahead of the Prime Minister’s Tory party. If this result occurs in the election, the Conservatives, who have been in power since 2010, are likely to suffer a historic defeat. Sunak has been in office since October 2022. He is already the third Prime Minister since the previous election in 2019, after Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
Unlike in Germany, in the United Kingdom the Prime Minister is largely free to decide on the date of the election within a generous period of time. He must give notice at least 25 working days in advance. The opposition has been urging Sunak for months to finally set an election date. They accused him of delaying the election date as long as possible given the poor poll numbers.
Despite several announcements and recently improved economic data, Sunak’s Conservatives have so far failed to close the gap to Labor. Most recently, they lost hundreds of seats and a key mayoral post in local elections in England, as well as a constituency in north-west England in a parliamentary by-election. The right-wing populist Reform UK party, the former Brexit Party, is also putting increasing pressure on the Tories.