London – Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain will return to power for a record-setting third successive term – but with a vastly reduced majority, reflecting his unpopularity over the war in Iraq.
Official results showed Labor had won enough seats to form a government and the BBC and Sky news projected Labor would win 79 more seats than all the other parties combined – down from its 161-seat margin in the outgoing House of Commons.
The projections, based on a survey of more than 16,000 voters in 115 closely contested districts, showed Labor with 37 percent of the popular vote, the lowest winning share ever. The Conservatives were projected to take 33 percent. The Liberal Democrats were estimated in third place with 22 percent.
Blair, bruised by opposition claims that he lied about the war, acknowledged Britons had punished his 8-year-old government.
“I know too that Iraq has been a divisive issue in this country, but I hope now that we can unite again and look to the future there and here,” Blair said.
Blair had already announced that Thursday’s election would be his last.
The projected margin – seeming to be neither overwhelmingly wide nor perilously narrow – seemed likely to hasten a hand over to Blair’s friend-turned-rival, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, his heir apparent who rallied to his defense during the campaign.
That could deny Blair the authority to build an enduring legacy from an era in which he dominated the political landscape with a vast expansion of public services and a pugnacious foreign policy, sending troops to the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq.
But it was the war in Iraq – when critics depicted Blair as a puppet of the United States – that damaged him the most, deepening voters’ mistrust.
Even in the final days of the campaign, the death of a British soldier in southern Iraq and disclosures about the ambiguous legal advice Blair received before the invasion rekindled accusations by his adversaries that he sent troops to a distant battleground on false pretenses.
Many longtime Labor supporters said it was only Brown’s last-minute support in the election campaign that shielded the prime minister from an even greater backlash against his handling of the Iraq campaign. That perception may strengthen Brown’s claim on the leadership.