LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative Party won a surprisingly solid victory in the British general election on Thursday, with nearly complete results Friday morning showing the party close to an overall majority in Parliament.
The result defied pre-election polls that suggested a tight race between the Conservatives and the opposition Labour Party. It returns Mr. Cameron to 10 Downing Street for a second term, possibly with enough seats in the House of Commons that he will not have to rely on support from smaller parties to enact his agenda.
He was expected to travel to Buckingham Palace on Friday to be invited by the queen to form a new government.
The vote was a stunning disappointment for Labour and its leader, Ed Miliband, who had shifted the party away from the more centrist strategy it pursued in the late 1990s and early 2000s under Tony Blair. Mr. Miliband was widely expected to step down as leader and open up a new debate over the party’s direction.
Labour was nearly wiped out in Scotland by the surging Scottish National Party and did poorer than pre-election polls had suggested it would in the rest of Britain. Several of Mr. Miliband’s top lieutenants lost their seats.
“Now the results are still coming in, but this has clearly been a very disappointing and difficult night for the Labour Party,” Mr. Miliband said in a quasi concession speech after being re-elected to his seat in the House of Commons.
“We haven’t made the gains that we wanted in England and Wales,” he said, “and in Scotland we have seen a surge of nationalism overwhelm our party.”
The results were also a disaster for Nick Clegg and his centrist Liberal Democrats, who have been the junior partner in a coalition with the Conservatives. Mr. Clegg hung on to his seat in the House of Commons but signaled that he would consider stepping aside as party leader.
“It is now painfully clear that this has been a cruel and punishing night for the Liberal Democrats,” said Mr. Clegg, who had served as deputy prime minister in the departing coalition government under Mr. Cameron.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the populist, anti-immigration, anti-European Union U.K. Independence Party, lost his bid for a seat in Parliament, and his party appeared to have won only a single seat. Mr. Farage had said that he would step down as the party’s leader if he failed to win his race, a step that would deprive it of much of its visibility and volume.
By midmorning in London, the Conservatives had won 320 of 650 seats in the House of Commons, and the BBC was projecting that the party’s total would rise to 329 by the time all the votes are counted. To govern with an absolute majority requires 326 seats, although 324 provides a working majority because members elected from the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party in Northern Ireland do not take their seats. The speaker of the House usually does not vote. Should the Conservatives win 329 seats, it would be a gain of 22 seats from the last election, in 2010.
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The result was something of a shock to a nation that had been conditioned by months of polls suggesting a near-tie between the Conservatives and Labour to expect days or weeks of negotiations following Election Day, in which the two parties would have to cobble together a viable coalition.
Asked on Friday why he thought the nation had returned the Conservatives to power, one Londoner, Peter Hamlin, 62, replied, “I think the general feeling is that maybe they had a hard job to do and they kind of did it O.K. and maybe it is time to give them a shot and maybe a shot on their own without liberals getting in the way of their policies.”
There was depression among Labour supporters. “I was really disappointed,” said Tom Sears, 32, who works at the London Zoo, “People like myself won’t suffer but I worry about people who suffer cuts.”
Speaking in his electoral district after his re-election, Mr. Cameron said it was “clearly a very strong night for the Conservative Party.”
With nearly all the constituencies reporting, Labour had won 228 seats and was projected by the BBC to end up with 234 seats, a decline of 24 seats from the 2010 results. In another humiliating blow for Labour, Ed Balls, who speaks for the party on economic issues and is one of its most influential figures, lost his seat of Morley and Outwood to the Conservatives.
“Any personal disappointment I have at this result is as nothing as compared to the sense of sorrow I have at the result that Labour has achieved across the United Kingdom,” Mr. Balls said after the result was announced.
The Scottish National Party won 56 of 59 seats in Scotland, rolling over Labour. In 2010, the Scottish nationalists won only six seats.
Nicola Sturgeon, the party’s leader, said on Friday that the “tectonic plates in Scottish politics have shifted.”
The success for the Scottish party, which favors independence for Scotland, was met Thursday night on Glasgow’s streets with the intermittent cheering and jeering reminiscent of soccer fans celebrating their favorite club.
Many in Glasgow seemed to think that another independence referendum appeared inevitable, despite the defeat of the pro-independence camp in a referendum last year.
For Mr. Cameron, the results appeared to be a vindication after a campaign in which opinion polls consistently showed Labour running even with the Conservatives. The campaign had centered primarily on domestic issues, including the budget austerity imposed by the Conservatives and funding for the National Health Service, but Mr. Cameron had also played up fears that a Labour government, reliant on support from the Scottish nationalists, would drive the country leftward and risk the nation being splintered.
Even if he is freed to govern without a coalition partner, Mr. Cameron will start his second term facing immense challenges, not least in holding off calls from Scotland for independence and in managing pressure from within his own party for Britain to leave the European Union.
Mr. Cameron has promised to try to renegotiate terms of Britain’s membership in the 28-nation European Union and to hold a referendum by the end of 2017 on whether Britain should remain in the bloc.
The results are also likely to fuel calls for a change to Britain’s electoral system to better represent national voting patterns.
The Scottish National Party, which fielded candidates only in Scotland, benefited from the British electoral system, in which parties compete in 650 districts but the votes of those not elected count for nothing.
With the Scottish National Party winning 56 seats, Labour was reduced to just one in Scotland. The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats also held one seat each. The Scottish party is forecast to become the third-largest in Parliament, with less than 5 percent of the nation’s votes.
“The Scottish lion has roared this morning across the country,” said Alex Salmond, former first minister of Scotland and former leader of the Scottish National Party, after being elected to the Westminster parliament.
The U.K. Independence Party, expected to draw many more votes across the rest of Britain, is likely to win just a few seats. Its leader, Mr. Farage, called for a reconsideration of the voting system to give more representation to supporters of smaller parties.
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