Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

That Time Theresa May Forgot that Elections Come With Opponents

| June 09, 2017

The prime minister saw an election as a simple step on her Brexit checklist. Turns out not everyone felt the same way.

Like war, elections are not exercises in project management.

Yet Prime Minister Theresa May approached last night's general election as if it were — just one more sequential step on her Brexit planning timeline, something to neatly check off between the formal Article 50 notification to leave the European Union in March, and the start of negotiations with the EU later this June. This mechanistic approach, in turn, translated into a tedious and robotic campaign, which combined a monomaniacal focus on "strong and stable leadership" with an effort to build a bizarre personality cult around May, to the point where Tory literature barely mentioned the Conservative Party....

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For more information on this publication: Belfer Communications Office
For Academic Citation: Simpson, Emile.“That Time Theresa May Forgot that Elections Come With Opponents.” Foreign Policy, June 9, 2017.

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