While we in the US have about six months before the midterms our friends over the pond go to the ballot box tomorrow in a race that could leave the country in a psuedo 2000 mess.
When the campaign began it seemed likely that David Cameron and his Conservative party would win a fairly easy victory over Gordon Brown and his Labour party. After 12 years in power the Labour party has fallen well out of favor with the voters.
However one of the big surprises of the campaign has been Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats. Traditionally elections have been between the Conservatives and the Labour party with the Lib Dems serving as a more liberal third party that sometimes made some noise but didn’t often have much impact on the campaign.
Clegg has really shined in this campaign and has brought the LD’s into a virtual tie with Labour (indeed often a slight lead). The Conservatives are still on top but the trend has been for a ‘hung Parliament’ where no party has a majority.
This could be a major problem since the likely outcome is Conservatives 1st, Labour 2nd and LD’s 3rd (at least in terms of seats). Since the LD’s are unlikely to pair with the Conservatives the only option for a majority government would be a Labour/LD coalition.
But with the way the election districts are drawn it is quite likely that Labour will end up 3rd in the voting, so to make a member of Labour Prime Minister after they’ve come in 3rd in the popular vote would not really be a viable move. Nor would Labour really want to put the LD leader in charge.
So if nobody wins a majority the most probably outcome would be a Conservative minority government, giving them the responsibility of rule without all of the power. This would likely lead to another election in the next year and thus more instability. Given that the EU is already in a crisis over Greece and Portugal and their economies, having a major government of the organization in chaos would not really help.
The fear of just such an outcome has led to a spike in Conservative support over the past few days and may well give them either a narrow majority or at least bring them very close to it. Indeed that is what I think will happen but then I am hardly an expert.
In any case the voting should be interesting to watch. The polls close tomorrow at around 9pm UK time which works out to 1pm Pacific/3pm Eastern here in the states. There will be plenty of coverage on the net as well as, I suspect, coverage on C SPAN.
I will be doing my best to blog the voting and hope you will take some time to check things out.
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