Britain's Labor Party called on Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Friday to call a general election after a landslide victory in local elections in England.
The ruling Conservative Party suffered heavy losses in Thursday's local elections, raising expectations that the Labor Party will return to power after 14 years in a UK general election due in the coming months.
Opposition Labour, which has been out of power since 2010, won a host of local council seats and mayoral elections, as well as a parliamentary seat in Blackpool, which was held in a by-election.
Labor has won control of councils in England that the party has not had for decades. If those results were repeated in the parliamentary elections, the conservatives would experience one of the biggest defeats in history.
Labor leader Keir Starmer said the decisive victories across the country, which included winning a new mayoral seat covering the Sunak constituency in the north of England, had sent a clear signal to the prime minister.
"The voters in Blackpool South sent a direct message to Rishi Sunak: let's have a general election," he said after visiting Blackpool.
Sunak must determine the date of parliamentary elections no later than January 28 next year.
He insisted voters would re-elect his Conservatives, taking solace in the Conservative mayor winning a third term in Tees Valley in north-east England, albeit with a much reduced majority.
"When the general election comes, (voters) will stick with us," Sunak said, as he celebrated a rare victory for the Conservatives on an otherwise bleak day for them.
For almost two years now, Labor has had a double-digit lead over the Tories in the polls.
If the results from the local elections are repeated in the parliamentary elections, the Labor Party could win 34 percent of the votes, and the Conservatives nine percent less, according to the BBC.
On the other hand, the Sky News projection for the general election based on partial local results says that Labor would win the most votes, but not enough to have a supermajority.
The travails of conservatives
There is also speculation in London that disgruntled conservative MPs could use the poor results to remove Sunak, which would force him to eventually call early elections.
He previously said that he was considering "the second half of 2024" for the elections.
Sunak became prime minister in October 2022 after the short-lived tenure of Liz Truss, who left office after 49 days after proposing a tax-cutting budget with no additional revenue, roiling financial markets and driving up borrowing costs.
Her chaotic and traumatic tenure has exacerbated the Conservatives' problems after the circus with her predecessor Boris Johnson, who was forced to resign after he was found to have lied to parliament about breaching the coronavirus quarantine in his Downing Street offices.
Nothing Sunak has tried to do has improved the Conservatives' position and Labor is consistently leading by 20 percentage points in the polls.
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