Britain’s Labour Party headed for a landslide victory Friday in a parliamentary election, an exit poll and partial returns indicated, as voters punished the governing Conservatives after 14 years of economic and political upheaval.

That would make center-left Labour’s leader Keir Starmer the country’s next prime minister. He will face a jaded electorate impatient for change against a gloomy backdrop of economic malaise, mounting distrust in institutions and a fraying social fabric.

“Tonight people here and around the country have spoken, and they’re ready for change,” Starmer told supporters in his constituency in north London, as the official count showed he’d won his seat. “You have voted. It is now time for us to deliver.”

As thousands of electoral staff tallied millions of ballot papers at counting centres across the country, the Conservatives absorbed the shock of a historic defeat that would leave the depleted party in disarray and likely spark a contest to replace Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as leader.

“Nothing has gone well in the last 14 years,” said London voter James Erskine, who was optimistic for change in the hours before polls closed. “I just see this as the potential for a seismic shift, and that’s what I’m hoping for.”

While the result tallied so far suggest Britain will buck recent rightward electoral shifts in Europe, including in France and Italy, many of those same populist undercurrents flow in the country. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has roiled the race with his party’s anti-immigrant “take our country back” sentiment and undercut support for the Conservatives, who already faced dismal prospects.

The exit poll suggested Labour was on course to win about 410 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons and the Conservatives 131.

With about a third of the official results in, the broad picture of a Labour landslide was borne out, though estimates of the final tally varied. The BBC projected that Labour would end up with 405 seats and the Conservatives with 154. Even that higher tally for the Tories would leave the party with its fewest seats in its nearly two-century history and cause disarray.

“It’s clear tonight that Britain will have a new government in the morning,” said soon-to-be former Defense Secretary Grant Shapps after losing his seat — one of a clutch of Conservative Cabinet ministers who went down to defeat.

In a sign of the volatile public mood and anger at the system, some smaller parties appeared to have done well, including the centrist Liberal Democrats and Reform UK. Farage won his race in the seaside town of Clacton-on-Sea, securing a seat in Parliament on his eighth attempt.

A key unknown remained whether Farage’s hard-right party could convert its success in grabbing attention into more than a handful of seats in Parliament.

Britons vote on paper ballots, marking their choice in pencil, that are then counted by hand. Final results are expected later Friday morning.