STOCKTON-ON-TEES, England — Even before the election campaign began, the verdict was in on Ed Miliband: He was too weak and too weird to be Britain's prime minister.
His approval ratings flirted with the lowest ever recorded for a major party leader. Among his Labor supporters, there were whispers of a coup. And with Britain's economy recovering from the depths of recession, Conservative Party leader David Cameron seemed to have reelection locked up.
But British voters, not known for their faith in the powers of redemption, have done something unusual over the past month: They've given Miliband, the 45-year-old son of Jewish refugees who fled to Britain to escape the Nazis, a second chance.
The Labor leader has seized it, tapping a vein of popular discontent over the widening gap between rich and poor. With the election on Thursday, he's now the favorite to become prime minister once the dust has settled on the closest and most politically fragmented British election in decades.
Polls suggest he is highly unlikely to secure a majority in the Parliament but could be positioned to lead an informal and potentially fractious coalition of parties from the left.
To those who know Miliband best, his comeback is not a surprise. Instead it's just the latest evidence of an inner combativeness that's often masked by his nice-guy demeanor and his obsession with policy. This, after all, is the same man who stands accused of political fratricide for overthrowing his older brother, the then-better-known David, along the way to becoming party leader.
''He's a ruthless politician,'' said Mehdi Hasan, who co-wrote an admiring biography of the younger Miliband.
And if he achieves a victory in the May 7 vote, Hasan and others say, he is likely to use it to push for a radically liberal shift in Britain's direction.
''He's the best chance for changing British politics in a profound way since Margaret Thatcher became prime minister,'' said David Clark, who served with Miliband as an adviser during Tony Blair's government. ''He genuinely has the potential to be a transformational figure.''
It's that potential, Clark said, that accounts for his dismal reputation until recently. ''Ed has chosen to pick his fights with the Rupert Murdochs of the world, the bankers, the energy companies,'' Clark said. ''That's why he's attracted such vilification. These people see him as a threat.''
Of course, Cameron and other Miliband critics argue that the threat is all too real — not just to the powerful, but to Britain as a whole. Cameron has now staked his reelection campaign on the message that a Miliband-led government would mean ''chaos'' and a reversion to the free-spending policies that dug Britain deep into debt before the Conservatives stepped in with a strict regimen of austerity.
The criticism has, at times, become intensely personal, with the prime minister calling Miliband ''despicable and weak'' for not ruling out a post-election deal with the leftist Scottish National Party.
Cameron's defense secretary, Michael Fallon, picked up the attack line and gave it a twist, when he argued that the Labor leader would bow to the SNP's wishes and sacrifice Britain's nuclear weapons program.
''Ed Miliband stabbed his own brother in the back to become Labor leader,'' Fallon wrote last month. ''Now he is willing to stab the United Kingdom in the back to become prime minister.''
Analysts widely expected the Conservatives to surge ahead in the final stretch of the campaign, with voters fleeing to the perceived safety of Cameron. Instead, the two leading parties have remained effectively tied in polls, with the post-election calculus among smaller parties giving Labor more options for forming a government.
That the race has remained so close is in large measure a result of the Labor leader's unexpectedly assured performances campaigning. The prospect of Miliband running the country — once faintly ridiculous, even among core Labor backers — has grown on voters.
''The character rather than the caricature of Ed has been coming through,'' said Stewart Wood, a top Miliband adviser.
And that character, Wood said, was forged in large measure through his parents. Miliband's father caught one of the last boats to Britain before the Nazis overran Belgium. His mother escaped to Britain from Poland, but her father died in a concentration camp.
Miliband, who describes himself as both culturally Jewish and an atheist, had a far less dramatic upbringing. But it was steeped in politics; his father, Ralph, was a prominent Marxist historian. The elder Miliband's career brought the family to the United States for visiting professorships during which his sons acquired a longtime fascination with American politics and, in Ed's case, a fanatical rooting interest in the Boston Red Sox.