Wednesday started as a fairly ordinary day in the UK. The big headlines were a drop in inflation and the ongoing inquiry into the Post Office scandal. Then, suddenly, Westminster’s rumour mill went into overdrive. Was prime minister Rishi Sunak suddenly going to call a general election? At 4pm, the Guardian’s Pippa Crerar and Rowena Mason were the first to confirm the rumours: an election is coming on 4 July. Britain could be about to say goodbye to 14 years of Conservative rule.

Elections are exciting things to cover and, as you’d expect, we’ll be reporting on every twist and turn of the campaign and keeping track of the polls, the results … and the gaffes. We’ll be covering the election in many different ways: from Andrew Sparrow’s essential live blog to our Politics Weekly podcast, new editions of video series Anywhere But Westminster, John Crace and Marina Hyde on the campaign trail to crucial data analysis and commentary. And launching on Monday 3 June is our late afternoon Election Edition newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

But, as we know, elections have real consequences. They matter. That’s why our mission for this and all the other huge votes taking place this year is to cover not just the odds, but the stakes.

For the UK vote we’ll focus a great deal of our attention on the ground across the country, listening to a diverse range of voters (and non-voters) about their concerns, as well as looking at how the last 14 years has shaped their lives. We’ll use the six weeks before the vote spending sustained periods of time in a handful of places across the nation. We want to find out what people are really thinking and why.

This has been our approach for some time. By listening to people and understanding their lives, really being curious about what they’re telling us and not assuming we already know, the big electoral “shocks” of the last decade came as less of a surprise. In 2016, Gary Younge spent a month in Muncie, Indiana, an ordinary middle American town. The sense of deep dissatisfaction Gary observed had gone largely unnoticed in Washington DC, and it was a clear portent of the Trump victory. As he wisely wrote afterwards, by going to places like Muncie “you’ll hear things that have nothing to do with the elections and everything to do with politics.”

We heard similar in John Harris and John Domokos’s Anywhere but Westminster films in the run-up to Brexit. Then, in 2019, when a hung UK parliament seemed a possibility, the voters we spoke to in our People and power series seemed to be telling us very clearly that Boris Johnson’s Conservatives were about to make huge headway in Labour’s heartlands.

So, we won’t just be poll-watching. But if – and it’s a big if – the polls are correct and Labour are headed for government, a win for Keir Starmer’s party could offer a moment of hope for progressives around the world against a headwind of far-right politics.

On 6-9 June, voters in the EU will elect a new European Parliament. Far-right and hardline conservatives are expected to poll very highly in at least 18 of the 27 member states. This, as Europe correspondent Jon Henley wrote earlier this month, could dramatically boost the profile of those parties domestically and threaten environmental legislation in Europe.

Then there’s the Trump-shaped elephant in the room. Our team in the US has spent the year so far doing important work about what a potential second Trump presidency could mean for the environment, healthcare, immigration and much much more.

India is also midway through an epic, and critical, election, where nationalist leader Narendra Modi is expected to win a third term when the results are finally confirmed in early June.

We’re excited to see what happens next in Britain — I can’t have been the only person to wake up with a spring in my step on Thursday morning. But wherever elections are taking place it’s crucial that we tell the human stories about how people really feel about where they live and how they are governed, and to interrogate the impact of decisions made by the victors once they’ve put their rosettes away. We have an unrivalled political team, led by political editor Pippa Crerar, to help us do that. But for now, it’s time to hit the road.

In a pair of superb dispatches from Kharkiv in Ukraine, the Guardian’s central and eastern Europe correspondent Shaun Walker wrote about fraught attempts to evacuate people from towns near the frontline and spoke to those attempting to maintain some kind of ordinary life while under constant Russian attack. As a local theatre director told him: “The closeness of death every day clarifies your perception and pulls away the things that aren’t meaningful.”

As Israeli forces advanced in Rafah, Gaza, Lorenzo Tondo reported on how members of the security forces are allegedly colluding with far-right activists and settlers blocking aid into Gaza by tipping them off to the location of the vehicles delivering the vital supplies. Jerusalem correspondent Bethan McKernan covered the ICC seeking arrest warrants for senior Hamas and Israeli officials, including Benjamin Netanyahu.

In her latest in a series of investigative pieces about British artist Damien Hirst, Maeve McClenaghan revealed that at least 1,000 paintings in his The Currency series were painted years later than claimed. The latest investigation raises further questions about Hirst’s dating techniques and follows her earlier much-read revelation that several of his well-known formaldehyde sculptures dated by his company to the 1990s were actually made in 2017.

In the 1970s and 80s more than 30,000 people in the UK were infected with HIV and hepatitis C after being given contaminated blood products. For decades, the victims and their families have been campaigning for justice. Earlier this week they finally learned how the government plans to compensate them. The final report, which ran to more than 2,500 pages, was pored over by Haroon Siddique and Rachel Hall who explored a cover-up that has taken 50 years to be fully exposed.

Guardian Australia’s transport reporter Elias Visontay and south-east Asia correspondent Rebecca Ratcliffe spoke with passengers about the moment Singapore Airlines flight SQ321 hit severe turbulence, leaving one British man dead and more than 70 injured.

A majority of Americans believe the US economy is in recession, despite official figures to the contrary. Lauren Aratani explored the troubling gap between the realities versus perceptions of the American economy and how it could impact Biden’s re-election bid.

Saturday magazine’s latest remarkable photography special gave us the 38 pictures that shifted how women are seen in the world (for better or worse). Author Anne Enright introduced the collection: “The lens has not lost its power to claim and possess. This is especially true when it is pointed at a woman. Even when the camera is in her control.” Truly sensational and utterly enjoyable.

Early on Sunday morning in Riyadh, Ukrainian Oleksandr Usyk defeated the UK’s Tyson Fury to become boxing’s unified world heavyweight champion. After the fight,Jonathan Liew pondered the morals of all involved (including viewers like himself).

Would you leave a baby in a pram outside a shop and not worry about it? Many Danes would. In the latest in our Euro visions series, Zoe Williams explored how Denmark became the most trusting country in the world – and how that fact has boosted their economy. An inspiration.

One more thing … I was delighted that one of my favourite contemporary European writers, Jenny Erpenbeck, won the International Booker prize this week for her latest book, Kairos. Erpenbeck grew up in East Germany and her novels evoke a world in which reunification isn’t an unequivocally happy ending — perhaps one of the reasons she is more successful in the Anglosphere (via her translator Michael Hofmann, who also won the prize) than at home in Germany, a theme explored by Lisa Allardice in her terrific interview. I loved meeting Erpenbeck in Berlin a few years ago. All her novels are wonderful, but I started with Go, Went, Gone and haven’t looked back.

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