Speaking outside Downing Street on Tuesday morning, Prime Minister Theresa May announced plans to hold a snap general election on June 8. Her decision, she says, was motivated by the need to secure political stability in Britain as it moves towards Brexit. “We need a general election and we need one now,” she said. “I have only recently and reluctantly come to this conclusion but now I have concluded it is the only way to guarantee certainty for the years ahead.” May reportedly informed the Queen of the impending election by phone on Monday, having reached her decision while on a walking holiday in Wales with her husband.

Since becoming prime minister, May has frequently asserted that she will not call a general election before 2020. “I’m not going to be calling a snap election,” she said, in an interview with the BBC. “I’ve been very clear that I think we need that period of time, the stability, to be able to deal with issues that the country is facing and have that election in 2020.”

“There isn’t going to be one. It isn’t going to happen,” a government spokesman said on March 20. “There is not going to be a general election.”

May justified her change of course by arguing that opposition parties, engaged in “political game-playing”, were obstructing her government’s attempts to navigate Brexit. “Labour have threatened to vote against the final agreement we reach. The Lib Dems have said they want to grind the business of government to a standstill. Unelected members of the House of Lords have vowed to fight us every step of the way.”

Under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, May cannot call an election directly, but must lay down a motion in the House of Commons that would need two thirds of MPs to back it. She is expected to propose the motion Wednesday. May, who is unelected and operates by a slender majority of just 17, will likely have been buoyed by recent polls that put her party 21 points ahead of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. Despite his slumping popularity, and the likelihood of a Conservative win, Corbyn—with little other choice available to him—said he welcomes an election. Tim Farron, leader of the diminished Liberal Democrats, whose popularity is set to soar in the election, positioned his party as emphatically opposed to a hard Brexit “If you want to avoid a disastrous hard Brexit, this is your chance,” he said. “Only the Liberal Democrats can prevent a Conservative majority.”

May’s announcement came just days after her Easter message, during which she suggested that the nation’s Christian values “can and must bring us together.” Speaking in a three minute-long video posted on YouTube, the vicar’s daughter, presumably aware she was about to call an election, optimistically outlined a sense of “people coming together and uniting behind the opportunities that lie ahead.”

In Brexit Britain, the notion of unity is often employed to mask the reality of division. While triggering Article 50 in March, May painted a stirring vision of an optimistic United Kingdom, an ideal she herself has sharply undermined by feeling the need to call an election. The Brexit referendum asked voters to awkwardly squeeze myriad complexities into the crude binary of Remain of Leave. Families, communities, and even the union, were left fractured, and reeling. Nearly a year later, it's proving difficult to heal Brexit-inflicted wounds in a climate made hazy by an unrelenting discord between words and reality. May's change of heart is surprising, but today feels more standard than shocking. Now, the U.K. is faced with yet another vote which for many, will take on the shape of another referendum. If the socially conservative May wins, her victory will allow her to push through a broad range of policies that span far beyond Britain’s split with its European counterparts, but Brexit will drive the majority of the electoral debate. Faced with choosing between hard Brexit or an ineffectual opposition, the decision facing the swathes of the population who want neither is unsatisfactory: a narrow choice split neatly between the opposing poles of power or protest.