British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Monday that he will step down by September, opening the door for his Labor Party to remain in power at the head of a “progressive coalition” with other left-of-center parties, despite being bested in last week’s indecisive election.
Nick Clegg, leader of the center-left Liberal Democrats, said his party was entering formal coalition negotiations with Labor, “on exactly the same basis” as its ongoing talks with the right-of-center Conservative Party, which won the most parliamentary seats in last week’s election but fell short of the outright majority it needed to form a government on its own.
The news threw the postelection landscape in Britain, which has not had such a “hung Parliament” since 1974, into fresh ferment, ending hopes for a swift resolution of the political horse-trading that left Britons with no clear idea who will be the next prime minister.
“There is … a progressive majority in Britain,” Mr. Brown said on the steps of No. 10 Downing St., the prime minister’s residence. “And I believe it could be in the interests of the whole country to form a progressive coalition government.”
If such a coalition would serve the national interest, he said, he would remain prime minister only long enough to see it formed and “ensure the path to economic growth is assured and the process of political reform we have agreed moves forward quickly.”
Mr. Brown said he had asked party officials to begin the internal election procedures to choose a new party leader — who would be the putative prime minister of any Labor-Liberal Democrat government — and hoped the procedures would be complete by the party’s annual conference in September.
Analysts said that given the center-left political DNA of the Liberal Democrats, a progressive coalition might be easier for the party’s leadership to sell to its grass roots than a deal with the Conservatives — especially because Mr. Brown has promised to move ahead immediately with legislation on the Liberal Democrats’ signature issue of electoral reform, whereas Conservatives have offered only a referendum on the issue.
Conservative negotiator and former party leader William Hague said the Conservatives, who traditionally have opposed any reform of the voting system, would “go the extra mile [and] offer the Liberal Democrats in a coalition the holding of a referendum on the alternative vote system.”
“Culturally,” said the British Broadcasting Corp. political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg, “the Liberal Democrats are much closer to Labor” than to the Conservatives.
But the prospects of a Labor-Liberal Democrat coalition are complicated by the electoral arithmetic. Despite an impressive showing in pre-election opinion polls, the Liberal Democrats performed poorly in last week’s vote, garnering 57 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons. That means that a coalition with the 306-member Conservative parliamentary grouping would have 363 members — an outright majority. But a coalition with Labor — which won 258 seats, the party’s poorest showing since World War II — would garner 315 seats, short of the 326 required to govern. Any Labor-Liberal Democrat pact would have to be underwritten by one or both of Britain’s small left-wing regionalist parties — the Scottish Nationalist Party and Plaid Cymru in Wales.
Mr. Hague said that if the Liberal Democrats formed a coalition with Labor, the resulting government “would not be stable or secure because it would rely on minor parties for any majority at all.” He added that it also would leave the country with its “second unelected prime minister in a row,” since Mr. Brown also achieved the post by virtue an internal party election.
At a Cabinet meeting Monday evening, Mr. Brown reportedly urged his Labor colleagues not to start an unseemly scramble to replace him. That advice seemed to have squelched for the time being at least one widely expected announcement of a candidacy for the leader’s post — that by David Miliband, the foreign secretary.
Other widely touted potential successors included Mr. Miliband’s brother, Edward, the energy and climate change secretary, and former Brown adviser and schools minister Edward Balls. Deputy leader Harriet Harman has ruled herself out of contention.
Adding to the turmoil in the party, there appeared to be growing unease Monday evening with the prospect of Labor trying to remain in power after it had been rebuffed by voters — especially given the likelihood that any incoming government would face a renewed recession, necessitating sharp and unpopular cuts in social spending to try to reduce the government deficit.
“It could be a disaster for the party,” said David Salisbury-Jones, a Labor grass-roots organizer who advised several candidates in last week’s election. “But as bad as it would be for us, it would be worse for them,” he added of the Liberal Democrats. “They are between a rock and a hard place.”
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