President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May have spoken about her plans to call a general election in June.
"I'm not going to be calling a snap election", she said shortly after taking office.
Since she came to power last June in the wake of Prime Minister David Cameron's failure to win the referendum on Britain's continued membership in the EU, Mrs May has had to tolerate jibes that she has no mandate to govern.
The decision is important because it suggests May will have little trouble securing enough votes to overturn the Fixed Parliaments Act, which set the date for the next election for 2020.
In the hours after Mrs May's surprise call for a snap election on Tuesday, Mr Corbyn had urged the Conservative leader to agree to a live TV event - describing them as "what democracy needs and what the British people deserve".
And better still from the government's perspective is the possibility that the Scottish National Party, which controls 56 seats in the outgoing Parliament, may lose a few seats, thereby boosting Mrs May's position, which is to refuse holding another referendum on Scotland's potential separation from the United Kingdom.
May also told the BBC that her political opponents were intent on "frustrating the Brexit process" - even after Parliament authorized divorce talks with the EU. Opinion polls give them a big lead over the Labour opposition, and May is gambling that an election will deliver her a personal mandate from voters and produce a bigger Conservative majority in Parliament.
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Under existing law, an election was not due until May 2020, and until today May has insisted she will not call an early election. TV debates don't have a long history in British politics, but were a feature of the last two elections, in 2010 and 2015. "If we do not hold a general election now, their political game-playing will continue", she said.
And her slim majority was even more hard to sustain, given the serious decisions the British Prime Minister was called upon to make in Europe.
Government spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer said Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke by phone Tuesday with British Prime Minister Theresa May.
Britain's Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn speaks at a meeting about social care in Birmingham central England Tuesday April 18, 2017.
The pound continued to trade at a six-month high against the U.S. dollar after Prime Minister Theresa May announced plans to call a snap General Election.
"If we're negotiating at a point that is quite close to a general election, I think the Europeans might have seen that as a time of weakness when they could push us", she said. In a shock announcement, Theresa May says that she will ask the House of Commons on Wednesday to back her election call.
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