Fresh from returning to the political fray in Britain, Brexit boss Nigel Farage has been predicted to come out on top in the seaside constituency of Clacton at the July 4th general election and secure a seat in Parliament.
After initially claiming to have been wrong-footed by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to call for a snap summer election — which severely limited the number of days to campaign — veteran populist Nigel Farage made an about-face on Monday, declaring that he would not only return as the leader of Reform UK (formerly the Brexit party) for at least the next five years but would also seek to unseat the Tories in Clacton and become the coastal English constituency’s Member of Parliament at next month’s general election.
While Farage is arguably one of the most impactful post-World War II political figures in the United Kingdom — having led the charge to lead the country out from under the thumb of the European Union and the Brussels bureaucrats — he has never held office in Britain, a point frequently brought up by his detractors.
Mr Farage has maintained that most of his previous attempts at running for Parliament were merely intended to give his nationalist-populist platform a larger audience on the national scale, with the exception of his failed 2015 bid for the seat in South Thanet. A Conservative political operative was later found guilty of falsifying election expenses and handed a suspended prison sentence, and prosecutors claimed the Tories more than doubled the legal spending limit, yet still only managed to narrowly defeat Farage.
That is not to say, however, that the populist campaigner is without a history of electoral success, having been elected to serve as a British Member of the European Parliament from 1999 until the UK’s withdrawal from the bloc in 2020. In the most recent election in which he meaningfully campaigned — the 2019 EU Parliament elections — Farage’s Brexit Party secured a staggering 5.2 million votes compared to 1.5 million for Theresa May’s Conservatives.
Although the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system heavily favours the two main establishment parties and the snap election means he will only have four weeks to campaign in Clacton while also campaigning nationally for Reform UK, there is a feeling among some that Farage’s eighth run for Parliament may be the charm.
Continue here: Breitbart
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