In the UK, polls are narrowing slowly in the still early days of the election campaign. Most survey trackers put the Conservatives at around 39–40 percent of the vote, while Labour have risen to eight to ten percentage points behind them. The Liberal Democrats and Greens have both fallen, after much hype. The “Remain Alliance,” the electoral pact in which the Green Party, Liberal Democrats, and Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru have agreed not to run candidates against one another in sixty districts, aims to coalesce the vote around these small parties, on the grounds that they are the true anti-Brexiteers: Plaid Cymru and the Greens argue for a second referendum on European Union membership, while the Liberal Democrats promise to revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU without a public vote if they emerge as the biggest party.

The fact that the Liberal Democrats definitely won’t win a majority swiftly caused some dissent within the new alliance: Labour’s policy is to negotiate a new Brexit deal if it wins, and then put that deal to a second referendum alongside the option to Remain. This has left some Green and Liberal Democrat candidates and local parties uneasy: if they split the anticipated Remain vote, they risk letting Conservative candidates beat Labour in marginal districts, and would thus be responsible for ensuring a Brexit delivered by Boris Johnson’s party.

In Northern Ireland, the electoral pacts were simpler and met with little consternation. In a handful of seats, the Remain parties — Sinn Féin, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, the Alliance Party, and the Greens — stood aside for the candidate most likely to beat the Democratic Unionist Party, the hard-line pro-Brexit party that entered into a confidence-and-supply deal with Theresa May’s Conservatives immediately after the 2017 election saw the then prime minister lose her majority in a fit of hubris.