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Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced that the next UK general election will be held on 4 July.

He made the announcement in a press conference outside 10 Downing Street on Wednesday afternoon.

Parliament will be dissolved on Thursday 30 May and the current Members of Parliament go back to being ordinary members of the public and many have to try to get elected again.

A general election is when adults vote for who they want to represent them in the UK parliament.

Read on to find out how general elections work in the United Kingdom.

What is a general election?

A general election is when voters decide who their members of parliament, known as MPs, will be.

Adults in the UK can vote for their local MP; someone they want to represent their local area in parliament.

When someone stands for election in a general election, it means they are putting themselves forward to be elected as an MP.

Most people who stand for election will choose to represent a political party. That's a group of people who all believe in a similar cause.

How is a general election called?

It is usually up to the prime minister to decide when a general election should be called.

Every five years, there has to be a general election.

Sometimes, the Prime Minister can also call an election earlier than that.

The Conservatives won the last election in December 2019, which means the next general election had to take place by January 2025.

What happens after a general election is called?

Parliament has to be ended - or dissolved - 25 working days before a general election takes place.

The current prime minister must go and visit the King to ask him to dissolve parliament. That usually starts the general election campaign.

Once this has happened, MPs are no longer MPs and all official parliamentary business stops.

But the current prime minister and their government ministers stay in their jobs until a new parliament is voted for.

You can read more about how the dissolution of parliament works here.

Who can vote in a general election?

Only adults - people aged 18 and over - can vote in a general election.

You need to register to vote to be allowed to vote in a general election.

There are three ways an adult can vote - in person at a polling station, by post or by applying to have someone vote on your behalf which is called voting by proxy.

Adults also need to show a form of ID at polling stations to be allowed to vote.

How do you win a general election?

The UK is divided into 650 areas, called constituencies.

Each constituency gets their own MP, who represents their area in parliament.

The clearest way of winning an election is by getting something called a majority.

If a political party gets at least 326 MPs elected - more than half of all MPs in parliament - then they have a majority and can form a government.

Some political parties decide to join up with similar ones to get a majority together. This is called a coalition.

If no one party gets a majority, then there's a hung parliament.

This means no official parliament has been announced yet, and politicians then go into talks, with the leading party usually trying to make agreements with other ones to form an alliance.