British Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has decided to initiate procedures for the dissolution of the House of Commons, setting the date of 4 July for the general elections in the United Kingdom . The convocation is thus brought forward by approximately 6 months compared to the natural expiry of the legislature.
According to the BBC, Sunak has informed the Council of Ministers of his decision, which involves the formal dissolution of Parliament - preceded by an expected ratification vote - next week. 40 days of electoral campaign will follow, until the vote scheduled for July 4th : in the second half of the year, as the prime minister had said for some time, even if only for a few days.
Sunak will address the nation from Downing Street soon after the end of the cabinet meeting. The acceleration seems to have taken part of the political world by surprise, including several Tory MPs, given the polls that show the Conservative Party around 20 points behind Labour.
The 44-year-old prime minister, the first head of the British government to be the son of Indian immigrants, is said to have broken the line to try to play the card of falling inflation, one of the few electoral chances he has left. And perhaps to present the departure in the next few weeks of a first flight of illegal migrants to Rwanda as a symbolic image of its promised post-Brexit tightening of the borders, without having to face any setbacks in the following months on this highly contested plan. The least unrealistic objective, from this perspective, could be to limit the scope of an almost announced Tory defeat; if not to try to aim for a "hung Parliament" scenario, imagining being able to prevent Starmer's Labor from achieving an absolute majority of seats in the House of Commons.
(Unioneonline/D)
