Support for the newly formed Brexit Party, led by the former U.K. Independence Party member Nigel Farage, has piled more pressure on British Prime Minister Theresa May as Conservative Party support in the upcoming European Parliamentary election hemorrhages.
Opinion polls are consistently showing the Conservative Party in third place behind the Brexit and Labour parties, while in some polls the Tories have slipped below the Green Party and Liberal Democrats to fifth.
Latest polls, the average of a number of surveys, show that the Brexit Party is in the lead at 30 percent while the Labour Party is the closest at 22 percent, with the Tory vote collapsing to just 12 percent. Some polls show that Labour and the Brexit Party very close – within 2 percentage points of each other, but all polls show the Tories lagging hopelessly behind the leading pair.
With no sign that May has garnered enough support to revisit Parliament with her withdrawal deal for a fourth time, pressure is mounting on the Prime Minister to resign. That pressure intensifies with every negative poll. And there is also some confirmation that cross-party talks have failed this week. Boris Johnson, the leading Conservative contender to replace May as Prime Minister, announced in the midst of those talks that he would rip up any deal May and Labour concluded. Therefore, it is difficult to see which way May can turn at this point.
If Brexit has been in a state of volcanic chaos since December 2018, it has now settled into a state of Pompeiian paralysis, with the protagonists petrified in a mire of their own making.
European Parliamentary elections starting on 23 May could yet unplug the Vesuvian dam, but it remains unlikely that Theresa May will see out the next few weeks as the party leader with the clamor for her resignation now apparently reaching its climax.