LONDON – Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservatives will fail to win a parliamentary majority in Britain’s election, according to an exit poll on Thursday, a shock result that would plunge the country into political turmoil and could delay Brexit talks.
The exit poll predicted the Conservatives would win 314 seats in the 650-member parliament and the opposition Labour Party 266, meaning no clear winner and a “hung parliament”.
The BBC reported that 76 seats appeared too close to call.
Until the final results become clear, it was hard to predict whether Ms May has a chance of surviving as prime minister and who might end up leading the next government and steering Britain into divorce talks with the European Union.
Senior Conservatives were quick to say exit polls had been wrong in the past. In 2015, the exit poll suggested they would fall short, but when the actual results came in they had a slim majority.
The exit poll pointed to an extraordinary failure for Ms May, who was enjoying opinion poll leads of 20 points and more when she called the snap election just seven weeks ago.
By putting her fate in voters’ hands, three years before an election was due, she had hoped to secure a much stronger mandate that would boost her in complex negotiations on the terms of Britain’s EU departure and its future trade relationship with the bloc.
Should she be forced to step down as Prime Minister, less than 11 months after landing the job, that would make her tenure the shortest of any British premier since the 1920s.
Her poll lead shrank over the course of the campaign, during which she backtracked on a major proposal on care for the elderly, opted not to debate her opponents on television and faced questions over her record on security after Britain was hit by two Islamist militant attacks that killed 30 people.
Ms May was widely derided for endlessly repeating her slogan of “strong and stable leadership” despite her u-turn on the care policy.
She gave few policy details and appeared mostly at tightly controlled events. Some critics nicknamed her “the Maybot”.
