Twelve days to go, the tension in the British election campaign seems to be slowly returning. In recent weeks, the Boris Johnson Conservatives had a big lead over Labor in the polls, but they are gradually shrinking.
They are very decisive elections for the United Kingdom. After all, it is the last chance for the opposition to stop brexit. If Johnson wins the elections and gets a majority in the House of Commons, he can easily push his brexit deal through the parliament and thus complete the departure from the EU on 31 January.
If he does not reach that majority, then an extremely complicated situation arises. Either Labor succeeds in forming a majority with the support of other opposition parties. In that case there will be a new referendum on brexit halfway next year.
Or a new stalemate arises, in which neither of the two major parties succeeds in getting a manageable majority together. In that case, it cannot be ruled out that elections will follow again.
Last week all eyes were on a very large poll conducted by opinion poll YouGov in which more than 100,000 Britons were asked about the party they were voting for. In the run-up to the previous elections, the same kind of poll indicated for the first time that then Prime Minister May was on his way to losing seat instead of winning, as was long assumed.
This time the Conservatives could reach 43 percent of the votes and 359 seats, well above the required 326 seats required for a majority. So good news for Boris Johnson.
At the same time, the average of all polls in recent days shows that the gap between Johnson and Corbyn is getting smaller. In many surveys, the gap has even shrunk to seven percentage points. As that gap becomes even smaller, it becomes increasingly difficult for the Conservatives to retain power.
Where they watch the dwindling hole in the polls with great excitement and pleasure, Scotland is. There, the SNP, the Scottish nationalist party, seems to be on its way to substantial profits. They benefit from anti-Brexit sentiment among many Scots (62 percent voted against Brexit in the referendum) and at the same time from the frustration about Prime Minister Johnson.