(MENAFN- Kuwait News Agency (KUNA)) The British General Election, due on May 7 , "is like no other, as it is shaping up to be unpredictable and exciting", analysts said Tuesday.
In the final hours before the poll, the historian, Professor Peter Hennessy, underlined that the unpredictability is due to the fact that the result is going to be inconclusive.
This would lead to what is called here, "a hung parliament", where no party achieves absolute majority.
This will raise the nagging question: "Who can win the vote of confidence from either the ruling Conservatives or the main opposition Labour party now, in the Queenآ's Speech in the House of Commons after the formation of the new government", he asserted.
Furthermore, prominent Professor of Political Science at Harvard University, Niall Ferguson (Scottish in origin) argued that the most important feature of the election is the surge of the Scottish National Party (SNP) which tried and failed to break up the UK in last Septemberآ's referendum to secure Scotlandآ's independence.
Nearly 50 million Britons are eligible to vote in the nationآ's first general election in five years.
Residents of each consistency, an area of around 70,000 citizens, elect a candidate to represent them in the House of Commons.
The party whichever emerges with the most seats (326 from the total of 650 seats) would have the best chance of forming a government, the analysts underlined.
But consistent opinion polls "stubbornly" showed that the result would be so close, with neither the Conservatives nor Labour able to achieve the decisive victory.
The two leading parties are running neck-and-neck in various opinion surveys and hence they would need to team up with one of the smaller parties: the SNP, the Liberal Democrats or UKIP, the anti-EU and immigration party, commentators noted.
They predicted that it is also possible that one party could try to form a minority government and hope the other parties donآ't unite together to bring it down.
Meanwhile, the collapse of Labour support in Scotland has provided an opening for the SNP to become "a king maker and a major player in London".
The left-leaning party is forecast to have the third-highest number of parliamentarians after the poll (59 seats), a remarkable result given their stated desire to break up from the rest of the UK, the analysts added.
But the SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, has pledged that, if the Conservatives are in the lead, but without securing absolute majority, she would back the Labour Leader, Ed Miliband, and help "lock the Conservative Leader, David Cameron, out of 10 Downing Street".
However, Miliband resolutely denies that he would team up with the "toxic SNP", who are determined to call at some time in the future for another referendum to achieve independence, the commentators observed.
In the meantime, they believed that the Conservativesآ' most likely
partners post-election is their current one in the present coalition: the
Liberal Democrats. However, the Lib Dems are likely to lose about half their current seats (57 seats).
Professor Peter Hennessy laments the possible "messy" outcome of the election, which could lead to unstable, shaky government after Britain was priding itself in the past for offering the "most stable political system through a government led by one of the two major parties, the Conservatives or Labour".
In the event of a hung parliament again, as after the election of 2010, one of them would have to rely on those small parties for support, and hence the new government could easily fall apart for one reason or another.
On the economy, after five years of the Conservative- led coalition, Cameron is touting success in pushing his country out of recession and halving the financial deficit, as well as putting two million people back to work.
During the long election campaign, which started on 30th of March, the
analysts recalled Cameronآ's pitch to voters not to risk another economic meltdown under Labour.
However, Labour pledged to bring down the deficit, and gradually get rid of the austerity measures adopted by Cameron and his most trusted Finance Secretary, George Osborne.
On foreign policy, all commentators agreed that the issue has hardly
featured in the 2015 general election campaign.
But Dr Robin Niblett, the Director of Chatham House, the leading think
tank on international affairs here, told Kuna: "you can be certain that it will weigh heavily on the list of priorities for the next Prime Minister.
The Iranian nuclear crisis, mounting Russian assertiveness in Ukraine, the growing threat posed by ISIS, the so-called Islamist terrorism in the Mideast and the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, are all major issues that will face the new UK government, whether it is led by a single party or a coalition", Niblett said.
In addition to that, Britainآ's future in Europe is going to be an important question, especially if Cameron wins the election, as he has vowed to call
for an in-out referendum on the UK membership in the EU by the end of 2017.
He hoped before that to renegotiate a new settlement with Europe, the analysts observed.
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