The U.K. Faces a Hung Parliament. What Happens Now?

Britain is getting a hung Parliament, forcing a battered Conservative Party to seek an alliance with the Democratic Unionist Party in a bid to hang on to power just as Brexit negotiations loom. It’s not clear how long Prime Minister Theresa May can stay in office or how it will affect the terms of the U.K.’s divorce from the European Union.

It’s when no single party has a majority of seats in the 650-member House of Commons. Britain’s political system requires the prime minister to have the "confidence" of Parliament, so the government of the day remains in power and enters into frenzied negotiations with other parties to prove it can form a workable solution. The alternative is to try to govern with a minority, relying on smaller parties to support legislation -- though such arrangements don’t tend to last long. The U.K. had short periods of this type of rule in the 1970s and, briefly, in 1997. The coalition deal that the Conservatives struck with the Liberal Democrats after the hung Parliament of 2010 was an exception, with the government lasting the full five-year term.