An exit poll carried out by polling company Ipsos, and paid for by the BBC, ITV and Sky says Starmer’s Labour Party will win the general election with 410 seats. The final outcome of the election should be clear by early on Friday.

Labour set to win a general election landslide with majority of 170, according to exit poll for the BBC, ITV and Sky

If the forecast is accurate, it means Keir Starmer will become UK prime minister with 410 Labour MPs – 326 seats are needed for a majority#BBCElection live ⬇️

— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) July 4, 2024

Labour is set to win a general election landslide with a majority of 170, according to an exit poll for the BBC, ITV and Sky.

To everyone who has campaigned for Labour in this election, to everyone who voted for us and put their trust in our changed Labour Party – thank you. https://t.co/q6yDNPnAbo

— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) July 4, 2024

If the forecast is accurate, Sir Keir Starmer will become prime minister with 410 Labour MPs – just short of Tony Blair’s 1997 total.

The Conservatives are predicted to slump to 131 MPs, their lowest number ever.

The Liberal Democrats are projected to come third with 61 MPs.

The Scottish National Party will see its number of MPs fall to 10, while Reform UK is forecast to get 13 MPs, according to the exit poll.

The Green Party of England and Wales is predicted to double its number of MPs to two and Plaid Cymru is set to get four MPs. Others are forecast to get 19 seats.

The exit poll, overseen by Sir John Curtice and a team of statisticians, is based on data from voters at about 130 polling stations in England, Scotland and Wales. The poll does not cover Northern Ireland.

At the past five general elections, the exit poll has been accurate to within a range of 1.5 and 7.5 seats.

If the exit poll is correct it will be a remarkable turnaround for the Labour Party, which had its worst post-war election result in 2019.

The Conservatives may avoid the wipe-out predicted by some opinion polls but their predicted result will be a devastating blow for the party after 14 years in government.

The Tory losses are likely to have been inflicted by the resurgent Liberal Democrats and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which looks set to win more seats than many polls predicted.

We will have to wait until the early hours, when the bulk of results start rolling in, to see if the exit poll is accurate.

Scotland’s former first minister Nicola Sturgeon said it was “not a good night” for the SNP, which is predicted to lose 38 seats, adding that she believed the prediction would be “broadly right”.

Labour’s predicted landslide would be just short of the 179 majority won by Tony Blair in 1997 and the party may achieve it on a smaller share of the vote than former leader Jeremy Corbyn won in 2017, according to Sir John Curtice.

But it will be seen as a vindication of Sir Keir Starmer’s efforts to change his party and move it back to the centre ground of British politics.

Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner told the BBC Sir Keir had done a “tremendous job” of transforming the the party but added “the exit poll is a poll so we haven’t had any results yet”.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said: “It looks like this will be our best result for a generation.”

The Conservatives are on course for their worst election since 1906, when they got 156 seats.

Rishi Sunak had insisted he could still win right to the end despite failing to make a dent in Labour’s commanding opinion poll lead over the six-week campaign.

Conservative Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride told BBC Radio 4: “This is a very difficult moment for the Conservative Party.”

He says he is “very sorry” that the exit poll is projecting that a number of his colleagues will lose their seats. On keeping his own seat, he says “we will have to wait and see”.

On Wednesday – the day before the election – Mr Stride made headlines when he admitted he thought it was likely there would be a massive Labour majority, effectively conceding defeat.

Not an ‘existential catastrophe’ for the Conservatives

Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University, says that while Labour’s predicted win was “very impressive,” the ruling Conservative party also did better than earlier opinion polls suggested.

“The Conservatives haven’t done quite as badly, it has to be said, as some of the polls during the campaign suggested. Some even suggested that it would go under 100 seats, it looks as if they’re going to pick up about 131…[but] it is a disaster for the Conservative Party but not an existential catastrophe,” Bale told Al Jazeera.

“I think they will be able to build back from this, how it will take for them to do this, however, is the big question”.

Bale added that the party has been in “chaos” since the Brexit referendum in 2016.

“None of the benefits the Conservatives so promised that would come about through Brexit have really materialised. So, I really couldn’t catch a nation if you like of circumstances which has led to this very, very bad result,” he said.

World Opinions + Agencies

L’article UK general election 2024: Exit poll points to Labour victory est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

Benjamin Netanyahu has begun to impose an overhaul of Israel’s institutions, which most of his fellow citizens do not want. The prime minister has succeeded in pitting against him some of the most influential entrepreneurs in the digital economy he prides himself on having created.

The head of the central bank, the leading representatives of the judiciary, all the former army chiefs of staff, the former leaders of the intelligence services, thousands of reservists, notably from the air force, the association of medical personnel and doctors… The list of the country’s driving forces who have warned him against such a move, to no avail, is endless.

His own camp is alarmed by this stubbornness. Netanyahu’s coalition was elected in November 2022 for four years, with 64 seats out of 120 in parliament. But for months, opinion polls have shown that most Israelis reject this reform or want it to pass only with the opposition’s approval by consensus.

A significant proportion of Netanyahu’s voters are turning away from him, witnessing the tearing apart of the Jewish majority – 80 % of the population – whose effects promise to be felt for years. Yet Netanyahu persists. On July 24, his coalition reduced the Supreme Court’s supervisory power over his actions and those of local administrations and the appointment and dismissal of senior civil servants.

It thus weakens the justice system’s ability to fight corruption and nepotism. But, more than the substance of the legislation, its passage by force is shocking. Netanyahu repeatedly refused to hear the chief of staff before the vote, even as discord spread through the army’s ranks. Thousands of reservists are no longer volunteering for the military, to which they are indispensable.

Radicalized base and messianic far right

According to the daily newspaper Haaretz, two generals dispatched in uniform to the Knesset waited for hours without being able to meet with certain ministers they were supposed to inform about the gravity of the crisis. The day after the vote, the major international rating agencies published harsh analyses. Netanyahu dismissed them.

Once again, the prime minister who has been on trial for corruption since 2020 says he will negotiate with the opposition before proceeding with his reforms. There is every reason to fear that this promise will amount to nothing. Justice Minister Yariv Levin intends to tackle the appointment of government legal advisors and Supreme Court judges during the fall to bring the institution in line.

Even among the ultra-Orthodox parties, at war with the Supreme Court for three decades, doubts are emerging. They realize secular and liberal Israelis are turning against their community. Only the radicalized electoral base of the “Bibists” and the messianic far right, which thrives on Israel’s colonial war in the Palestinian territories and dreams of a Jewish theocracy between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, remain adamantly committed to the reform.

For over 15 years, Netanyahu ruled by pitting one part of Israel against another: Jews against Arabs, Mizrahi Jews against Ashkenazis, the country’s center against its periphery, and the “people” against the institutions. It was a tactic, a way to become indispensable. Now it is his very legacy.

World Opinions + Le Monde

L’article Debate. Benyamin Netanyahu and the politics of division est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

At least 108 police officers have been injured in clashes across France with protesters angry at pension reforms, the interior minister has said.

#France is officially a police state.
In #Paris there exists no democracy. The so called "Free World" is actually a scam – in practice it's the opposite. #1deMayo #1deMayo2023 #parisprotests #1stMay #1stMay2023 #1stMayLabourDay https://t.co/HzVrJF2xGo

— Proud African (@MpeseProud) May 1, 2023

🇫🇷 #Macron: "Like it or not, his international stature and credibility is affected by what's going on in #France at the moment." @Blickch's @richardwerly explains, on the #F24Debate, as resistance to the French president's controversial #pensionreform continues ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/I6539mssw1

— The Debate – France 24 (@F24Debate) May 1, 2023

Gerald Darmanin said such a large number of police wounded was extremely rare, adding that 291 people had been arrested during the unrest.

Hundreds of thousands have been taking part in May Day demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron’s reforms.

Viva la #France https://t.co/oqnN9tMtbJ

— @SirCryptoShark (@sircryptoshark) May 1, 2023

Most were peaceful but radical groups threw petrol bombs and fireworks.

Police responded with tear gas and water cannon.

It is not clear how many protesters have been injured.

This is the latest day of mass action against changes that raise the state pension age from 62 to 64. The unions want the measures withdrawn.

Os números apontam para 3 milhões de pessoas nas ruas e 600 mil só em Paris. Os franceses já sabem o que é o Globalismo e o WEF. Isto nada tem a ver com a idade da reforma.#paris #France #DiaDoTrabalhador pic.twitter.com/ITystXez1Y

— Nuno Pereira 🇵🇹 (@matospereiracom) May 1, 2023

The Interior Ministry put the overall number of demonstrators at 782,000, including 112,000 in the capital Paris, but the CGT union say the figure is three times that number.

#BREAKING #FRANCE #PARIS

🔴 PARIS :#VIDEO MAY DAY PROTESTS OR WAR IN PARIS!
SEVERE CLASHES, CHAOS..

Tensions rise in Paris on Labor Day.
French police(CRS) hit by firebombs.
Many policemen & protesters injured. #BreakingNews #UltimaHora #Manif1erMai #Protests #Protestas pic.twitter.com/5H4tZe8Omc

— LoveWorld (@LoveWorld_Peopl) May 1, 2023

In Paris, one police officer suffered serious burns to his hands and face when struck by the petrol bomb.

Violence also broke out in Lyons and Nantes, and there were reports that protesters briefly occupied a luxury hotel in the southern city of Marseille.

#1erMai – #1erMai2023 #1erMaiUnitaire#Manif1erMai #manifestations #FranceProtests#France #Macron https://t.co/VEsVY2i7lj

— LauRañe (@lau_avel) May 1, 2023

World Opinions – Agencies

L’article France protests: More than 100 police hurt in May Day demonstrations.. Video est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

Afew months before sweeping to power in the 2017 presidential election, Emmanuel Macron published a memoir-cum-personal manifesto, Revolution. In it, he made the case for rebellion against allegedly outmoded institutions and ideas that were holding back France. Six years on, it is the popular revolts against Mr Macron’s own policies which have taken centre-stage.

Recent months have seen some of the largest protests in the history of the Fifth Republic, as Mr Macron has sought to push through a deeply unpopular plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. On Monday, his government survived a related parliamentary motion of no confidence by the skin of its teeth. This followed the president’s controversial – though constitutional – decision to use executive powers to get his way, bypassing a vote in the national assembly that he thought he might lose.

Among his own MPs, the manoeuvre provoked public misgivings. Elsewhere, even allowing for the usual political game-playing, the response was authentically furious. One MP from the centre-right party Les Républicains – which Mr Macron’s minority government needs onside to achieve majorities – accused the president of acting in an “isolated, narcissistic way, impervious to French people’s lives”.

President Macron’s decision to force through his pension reforms without a vote damages French democracy

In this respect, the president could be said to have form. In 2018, his high-handed approach helped transform provincial protests against a fuel tax into the wider gilets jaunes revolt against elites. A penitent Mr Macron embarked on a nationwide “listening tour”. Then, when his Renaissance party lost its majority last June, he again promised a more consensual approach. But less than a year into his second term – amid widespread anxiety about falling living standards – he has reverted to Jupiterean type, defying the wishes of the two-thirds of the French population who oppose his reforms, and circumventing the democratic niceties of winning a debate in parliament.

For a smart president, this seems like strangely dumb politics. The protests and strikes may eventually fade, although more are planned and the sense of popular outrage is real. But Mr Macron’s reputation as an arrogant technocrat with little regard for social movements or civic sentiment is surely sealed. His prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, now appears to be a busted flush along with her government, but seems determined to stay in post. The president’s second term risks becoming a long and acrimonious goodbye, with little achieved.

An independent government body has judged that the pension system’s deficits are manageable for the foreseeable future, making it hard to understand why Mr Macron decided to take such a confrontational approach. Amid record levels of abstention at elections, the rise of online conspiracy theories and the all but accomplished normalisation of the far right, Mr Macron’s resort to government by decree has done nothing to ease the trust deficit in French politics. Marine Le Pen and the far right may well be the principal beneficiaries of that. Having presented himself as the right man to modernise the country, Mr Macron increasingly looks like a politician out of touch with the needs of the times.

World Opinions – The Guardian view

L’article  View on ruling by decree in France: deepening the trust deficit est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s move to force through his deeply unpopular pension reform, without a vote in parliament, could rekindle social unrest reminiscent of the Yellow Vest movement, union leaders and analysts have warned as protests continue to sweep the country.

Demonstrations against the government’s use of a special constitutional provision, known as article 49.3, to sweep aside parliamentary opposition to the reform have been angrier than anything seen over the past two months.

Unions, united in coordinating their protests, called for a ninth strike day next Thursday, but many expressed fears they could lose control of the protests as more radical demonstrators set the tone.

“Yes, we are worried,” Cyril Chabanier, the head of the moderate CFTC union, told AFP.

Commentators have begun to wonder whether the hardening of fronts could herald the return of the Yellow Vests, a grassroots movement that started in 2018 as a protest against rising fuel prices and snowballed into the biggest social action against Macron in his first term.

“It’s a social law of physics,” said Jean-Marie Pernot, a political scientist specialising in trade unions.

“If you don’t respect any of the channels meant for the expression of dissent, it will find a way to express itself directly,” he told AFP.

Early Yellow Vest action was marked by strikes, weekly demonstrations, the blocking of roads and fuel depots, and the worst clashes with riot police in decades.

It was only with the imposition of restrictions on movement brought about by the Covid crisis that the movement’s actions were brought to a halt.

‘Tougher action ahead’

“There may be tougher action ahead, more serious and further-reaching,” warned Fabrice Coudour, a leading energy sector representative for the hard-left CGT Union.

“It may well escape our collective decision-making,” he said.

The Yellow Vests prided themselves on having no designated leaders. They resisted attempts by left-wing politicians and unions to harness the movement’s energy for their own ends.

One of their more prominent spokesmen was Jerome Rodrigues, who lost an eye to a police rubber bullet during clashes at one demo.

Within hours of Macron’s pensions move on Thursday, Rodrigues told an angry, cheering crowd outside the National Assembly that the objective was now nothing less than “the defeat” of the president.

At the same time, protests erupted in many parts of France, some demonstrators destroying street furniture, smashing windows and setting bins on fire.

In the central French city of Dijon, protesters burned effigies of Macron.

The CGT announced that it would force the shutdown of energy giant TotalEnergies’ refinery in Normandy in France’s northwest as of this weekend.

Picket lines at power utility Electricite de France would also be extended, the CGT said. And early on Friday, CGT activists blocked Paris’s busy ringroad, the Boulevard Périphérique.

‘Government’s fault’

The unions have already put the responsibility for any future trouble at the government’s doorstep.

“Obviously, when there is this much anger and so many French people on the streets, the more radical elements take the floor,” said Laurent Escure, boss of the UNSA trade union federation. 

“This is not what we want, but it’s going to happen. And it will be entirely the government’s fault,” he told AFP.

For weeks, Laurent Berger, head of the moderate CFDT union, has been warning the government that there could be more trouble if protesters got the idea that the Yellow Vests achieved more with violence than established unions with their peaceful, mass demonstrations.

“What is the democratic outlook for a country that fails to respond to 1.5 or 2 million people in the streets on three occasions, but that did respond to a violent movement with a fifth of that number in the street?” he asked in an interview last month.

Macron made a number of concessions to the Yellow Vest movement.

Among other measures, he scrapped a planned carbon tax and boosted salaries for minimum wage earners, for a total estimated cost to public finances of 10 billion euros ($10.7 billion).

World Opinions – FRANCE 24 – AFP

L’article French unions see threat of Yellow Vest rerun over Macron’s retirement push.. Video est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

More than 250 protests have been staged in the French capital Paris and around the country against President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms with rubbish collectors, utility workers, train drivers and others walking off the job against the proposed legislation.

An estimated 1.28 million people demonstrated nationwide on Tuesday against Macron’s plans to push back the retirement age to 64, the interior ministry said. The protests come weeks after an estimated 1.27 million people participated during the previous round of protests.

Big crowds took to the streets in Paris, Marseille, Nice and other cities. Some minor clashes with police broke out in Nantes, Rennes and Lyon.

In the French capital, workers, families and activists gathered in a joyful atmosphere, chanting slogans.

Despite the Paris march being largely peaceful, some scuffles sporadically broke out on the sidelines, with some people throwing projectiles at police who responded with tear gas.

Unions threatened to freeze up the French economy with work stoppages across multiple sectors, most visibly an open-ended strike at the SNCF national rail authority.

More than 1.28 million people took to the streets in France as unions intensify fight against Macron’s pension reform.

Some unions have called for open-ended strikes in sectors from refineries and oil depots to electricity and gas facilities. Workers in each sector will decided locally in the evening on that, Martinez said.

All oil shipments in the country were halted on Tuesday amid strikes at the refineries of TotalEnergies, Esso-ExxonMobil and Petroineos groups, according to the CGT.

Truckers have sporadically blocked major highway arteries and interchanges in go-slow actions near several cities in French regions.

A fifth of flights were cancelled at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport and about a third of flights at Orly Airport. Trains to Germany and Spain were expected to come to a halt, and those to and from the United Kingdom and Belgium will be reduced by a third, according to the SNCF rail authority.

Most high-speed trains and regional trains have been cancelled.

Public transportation and other services were disrupted in most French cities. In Paris, the Eiffel Tower was closed, as was the Palace of Versailles, west of the capital.

According to the education ministry, about one-third of teachers were on strike nationwide.

The reform would raise the minimum pension age from 62 to 64 and require 43 years of work by 2030 to earn a full pension, amid other measures. The government has argued that the system is expected to dive into deficit within a decade as France’s population ages and life expectancy lengthens.

The bill is under debate in the French Senate this week.

World Opinions – agencies

L’article French workers stage massive strike against pension reform.. Pictures est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.