Britain votes today

Britain’s political leaders entered the final hours of campaigning on Wednesday in the most unpredictable election in living memory which could yield no clear winner and weeks of haggling over the next government.

A win for Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives on Thursday would raise the risk of Britain exiting the European Union because he has promised a referendum on it by 2017. But some business leaders and investors have warned that the main opposition Labour party, led by Ed Miliband, could be bad for the economy, which is weighed down by a budget deficit of nearly £90 billion.

With neither expected to win outright and smaller parties on the rise, the election is also likely to underline the decline of traditional two-party politics in Britain.

“This has been a remarkable election,” Professor Tony Travers of the London School of Economics said, predicting that it would lead to some form of multi-party government “probably less stable than the one that formed in 2010.”