LONDON — An exit poll projected a surprisingly strong showing for Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party in Britain’s election Thursday, suggesting it is within touching distance of forming a new government.
The opposition Labour Party fared worse than expected, the exit poll suggested, and Cameron’s coalition partner, the Liberal Democrat Party, was expected to lose most of its seats. The biggest surge was for the separatist Scottish National Party, which was expected to take all but one of the seats in Scotland.
The exit poll, based on interviews with 22,000 voters, differed strongly from opinion polls conducted during the monthlong election campaign, which had put the Conservatives and Ed Miliband’s Labour Party neck and neck with about a third of the vote each.
Political leaders said they would wait for actual results before jumping to conclusions, and some in the Labour Party expressed skepticism about the poll.
“I have to say it just doesn’t feel right,” said longtime Labour adviser Alistair Campbell.
The survey was conducted by pollsters GfK and Ipsos MORI for Britain’s broadcasters and released as polling stations closed at 10 p.m.
Results began coming in within an hour of polls closing. The seat of Houghton and Sunderland South in northeast England was the first of the 650 to complete the traditional election-night ritual: Votes in each constituency are counted by hand, and the candidates line up onstage as a returning officer reads out the results.
The first three seats of the night all went to Labour, as expected.
The exit poll projected that the Conservatives would get 316 seats — up from 302 and far more than had been predicted — and Labour 239, down from 256. The Liberal Democrats would shrink from 56 seats to 10, and the Scottish nationalists would grow from six to 58.
If the exit poll is accurate, the Conservative Party would be in a commanding position to form the next government by seeking partners from smaller parties.
There could be a rerun of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that has governed since 2010. The poll put the two parties’ total at 326, just more than half the 650 seats in the House of Commons.
Cameron could also seek support from the right-of-center Democratic Unionists in Northern Ireland, which had eight seats before the election, or the anti-European U.K. Independence Party.
The Conservatives and Labour have both watched voters turn elsewhere, chiefly to the Scottish nationalists, who will dominate north of the border, and the anti-immigrant U.K. Independence Party.
UKIP ran third in opinion polls, but the exit poll predicted it would win just two seats, because its support isn’t concentrated in specific areas. The Greens were also forecast to get two seats.
Conservative politicians did not declare victory, and Labour did not concede defeat, as everyone waited to see whether the poll’s surprising predictions would be borne out.
