LONDON - The 2019 U.K. general election is proving to be one of the most volatile and difficult to predict in modern British history, according to local media and pollsters.
This is due both to the ongoing polarization of Brexit and the rising trend of tactical voting.
Tactical voting is where a person votes for a party or candidate who is not their first choice but stands the best chance of beating the party or candidate who they least want to win.
This can be aided by electoral pacts between parties and candidates, who might withdraw from certain seats in order to beat a particular party or candidate.
In the U.K., the centrist Liberal Democrats, the environmentalist Green Party and the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru – all pro-Remain parties – have agreed not to run in certain seats in order to boost their chances of defeating center-right, pro-Brexit Conservative candidates.
On the other side of the political spectrum, the right-wing Brexit Party has agreed not to stand in the 317 seats the Conservative Party won in the last election.
The center-left Labour party, the main opposition party, has not entered into a pact with any other party.
There are a number of tactical voting websites, mostly focused on how to boost pro-Remain MPs. But they disagree on which party to vote for due to differences in their polling data, further complicating matters.
The U.K. uses a ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system, where the candidate with the highest number of votes wins that particular seat. This means an MP does not need more than 50% of the vote to win a seat and that a party with a large share of the national vote but that comes second in the majority of the seats it contests is not rewarded with seats in parliament. (Interfax)