In the midst of the embers, it may make sense to grasp at straws. Rishi Sunak has taken advantage of the drop in inflation in the United Kingdom last April to 2.3% to clear up the great political doubt of recent months. The British Prime Minister announced this Wednesday an advance of the general elections – until now scheduled for the autumn – for July 4. The Conservatives are at least 20 percentage points behind the Labor Party in all polls, and there is a general consensus in the country that the possibility, increasingly real, that Keir Starmer will be the next tenant of Downing Street. Sunak’s movement, sheltered by economic data that predicts a meager improvement in the country, is rather interpreted as the way to put an end to the final agony of more than 14 years of governments Tories.
The inflation figure, although good, is worse than expected by analysts (2.1%); the growth of the economy in the first quarter of the year has been barely 0.6%; Nobody today trusts that the Bank of England will cut the interest rate at its June meeting; and, finally, his team has already warned Sunak that he has no room for a new tax cut before the end of the year. The Prime Minister has urgently called his Government early this Wednesday to inform his members of the decision, before the announcement of the early elections at the doors of Downing Street.
“These elections will take place when the world is in the most dangerous situation since the Second World War. Putin’s Russia has launched a brutal war against Ukraine, and it will not stop there if he succeeds. I have always been honest about what needed to be done in times of difficulty. I am guided by what I consider best for the country, not the easiest. The same cannot be said of my rival in the Labor Party,” Sunak assured at the doors of Downing Street, under incessant rain that in the few minutes of his intervention has soaked into the prime minister. Quite a metaphor for a shrinking politician desperate to enlarge his image before the electorate. A few meters away, on the street, a group of protesters were blaring loudly. Things Can Only Get Better (Things can only get better), the song of the Irish D:Ream that Tony Blair used as the soundtrack in his successful 1996 campaign. Not even Sunak’s worst enemy could have designed worse scenery—the rain—or a more humiliating soundtrack.
“On July 5, either Keir Starmer or I will be prime minister,” he said, in a rare admission that his chances of victory are rather slim. “He [Starmer] He has shown, time and time again, that he will always take the easy route to power. He has had no problem abandoning many of the promises he made to take over the leadership of the Labor Party. How can we know now that he will not do the same if he reaches Downing Street? ”Sunak said, thus giving clues to his electoral strategy: awakening fear of the left among conservative voters.
The last municipal elections in England, earlier this month, offered a clear real demonstration of the mood of voters. The Conservative Party lost almost half a thousand of its councillors, but above all it was harshly punished in areas where, under normal circumstances, it would have been able to revalidate its mandate.
Sunak came to power after the fiasco of his predecessor Liz Truss, who in less than two months managed to sink the pound sterling and the international credibility of the United Kingdom with a drastic tax reduction plan that alerted the markets for its lack of fiscal rigor. . Sunak, former Economy Minister whose resignation contributed decisively to the fall of Boris Johnson’s Government, was selected by the deputies of the conservative parliamentary group – not by the party’s rank and file – to rescue the country’s accounts. Of Indian origin, although born in Southampton, a practicing Hindu and the son of a doctor and a pharmacist who had worked hard to give their son a first-class private education, Sunak represented a modern and serious technocracy in the face of the ideological lurches of his predecessors. Truss and Johnson.
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The prime minister was educated at Oxford and Stanford and is married to Akshata Murty, the daughter of Indian billionaire Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys who revolutionized the new digital technology services sector. With 250,000 employees around the world, Murthy and his family own one of the largest fortunes on the planet.
Rwanda’s obsession
Along with this technocratic vision of the world obtained in his years of work in California, which has prompted him to launch ambitious projects, for example, around artificial intelligence, Sunak has not been able to avoid falling into a populist and xenophobic discourse, dragged by the hardline wing of his party, in the face of the challenge of irregular immigration. He inherited, and took full ownership of, the plan to deport immigrants to Rwanda that Johnson launched as a smokescreen to hide his own scandals.
After battling with the courts, passing a law that almost completely limits the ability of new arrivals to apply for asylum, and threatening to challenge international legality if the European Court of Human Rights opposes their deportations, Sunak has promised that the first flights to Rwanda will take off in July. Just when conservative voters, obsessed with the immigration issue almost as much as with the economy, have been summoned to the polls.
Starmer touches Downing Street with his hand
The leader of the Labor Party, who inherited a formation very leaning to the left with his predecessor, Jeremy Corbin, has worked for four years to return to the center and rescue the image of moderation and support of the middle classes with which Tony Blair obtained your success.
Led by the spokesperson for the Economy – and future minister, if the polls are confirmed – Rachel Reeves, Starmer has managed to convey an image of economic rigor and budgetary responsibility, in addition to seducing British businessmen. The price in exchange has been to erase from her speech any reference to Brexit and categorically rule out a return of the United Kingdom to the community club, or to its customs space or internal market. The Labor leader was well aware that a speech along those lines would have scared away all those millions of traditional voters on the left who in 2019 were seduced by Johnson’s populism.
Starmer was able to nip in the bud, as soon as he took over the reins of the Labor leadership, all the episodes of anti-Semitism that had poisoned the internal climate of the party in recent years, to the point of ordering Corbyn’s expulsion from the parliamentary group.
In recent months, his defense of Israel’s right to respond to the Hamas attacks on October 7, or his delay and lukewarmness in demanding a ceasefire, have made a good handful of municipal Labor representatives, in areas with a large Muslim population, will abandon their positions. And he even had to stop, with a last-minute twist, a rebellion by his deputies, willing to support a parliamentary motion in favor of Palestine that went further than the official party line.
In return, Starmer has managed to convince a majority of Britons that his victory is now inevitable. Seven out of ten citizens are now sure that the next UK Government will be Labour, according to the polling company YouGov.
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