Alliance Party of Northern Ireland

Alliance Party of Northern Ireland
Party leader	Naomi Long
founding	April 21, 1970
Headquarters	88 University Street Belfast Northern Ireland
Youth organization	Young Alliance
Alignment	Liberalism Interdenominationalism
Colours)	Yellow black blue  
British House of Commons	1/650
Northern Ireland Assembly	8/90
Local government in Northern Ireland	32/462
International connections	Liberal International (LI)
European party	ALDE (associated)
Website	allianceparty.org

The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland ( Alliance ) is a non-denominational and liberal regional party in Northern Ireland .

Party history and development

The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland was founded in 1970 at a height of the Northern Ireland conflict with the aim of establishing a non-denominational political party on the hardened fronts in Northern Ireland. The party supports the union with Great Britain as long as the majority of the population agrees. The party also stands for formal ties between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland . The Alliance Party was involved in the negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement and campaigned for approval in the subsequent referendum .

In British politics, the party is based on the Liberal Democrats , on the international level it is a member of the Liberal International and an associated member of the ALDE party . The party relies on long-term trends, on the one hand on the fact that voters will increasingly orientate themselves less and less on religious or denominational ties in their voting decisions in the future and on the other hand that there will be more and more voters who come from cultures outside Northern Ireland or even come from Europe (e.g. immigrants from the Commonwealth ) who do not feel addressed by the regional confessional parties.

With Anna Lo , a native of China entered a European Parliament for the first time in the 2007 elections. The Hong Kong- born MP has her constituency in the south of the capital, Belfast . In the 2003 elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly , the party hit a temporary low with just 3.7% of the vote and 6 out of 108 seats. Since then she has been able to slowly increase the share of votes and mandates again. In the British general election on May 6, 2010 , the Alliance won with Naomi Long for the first time a seat in Parliament in Westminster. In her constituency, Belfast East, Long defeated First Minister for Northern Ireland, Peter Robinson of the Democratic Unionist Party , who had held the mandate there since 1979, but was afflicted by an affair. The mandate was lost again in the following general election in 2015 . In the May 2016 election for the Northern Ireland Assembly , the Alliance received 7.0% of the vote and eight seats. In the early election of the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2017 , the Alliance won 9.1% of the vote, their best result since 1998. In the 2019 general election , the Alliance won another mandate with the constituency North Down and was able to significantly increase its share of the vote in the context of the “Brexit” debates.

The Alliance was represented for a long time as the only non-denominational party in the Northern Irish government, where it provided the Minister of Justice with party chairman David Ford and the Minister for Labor and Learning with Stephen Farry . After the election for the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2016 , the party decided not to participate in the government on the grounds that, as a coalition partner, it could not sufficiently implement its political goals.

Party leader

• Oliver Napier (1972-1984)
• John Cushnahan (1984-1987)
• John Alderdice (1987-1998)
• Seán Neeson (1998-2001)
• David Ford (2001-2016)
• Naomi Long (since 2016)

Election results

The election results in the following table refer to Northern Ireland (also for the all-British elections). General elections were carried out consistently by majority voting , elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly from 1998 and elections to the European Parliament by preferential suffrage .

year	choice	Share of votes	Seats
1973	Northern Ireland Assembly 1973	9.2%	8/78
1974	General election Feb. 1974	3.2%	0/12
1974	General election October 1974	6.4%	0/12
1979	General election 1979	11.9%	0/12
1979	European elections 1979	6.8%	0/3
1982	Northern Ireland Assembly 1982	9.3%	10/78
1983	General election 1983	8.0%	0/17
1984	European elections in 1984	5.0%	0/3
1987	General election 1987	10.0%	0/17
1989	European elections 1989	5.2%	0/3
1992	General election 1992	8.7%	0/17
1994	European elections in 1994	4.1%	0/3
1997	General election 1997	8.0%	0/18
1998	Northern Ireland Assembly 1998	6.5%	6/108
1999	European elections 1999	2.1%	0/3
2001	General election 2001	3.6%	0/18
2003	Northern Ireland Assembly 2003	3.7%	6/108
2004	2004 European elections	6.6%	0/3
2005	General election 2005	3.9%	0/18
2007	Northern Ireland Assembly 2007	5.2%	7/108
2009	European elections 2009	5.5%	0/3
2010	General election 2010	6.4%	1/18
2011	Northern Ireland Assembly 2011	7.7%	8/108
2014	European elections 2014	7.1%	0/3
2015	General election 2015	8.6%	0/18
2016	Northern Ireland Assembly 2016	7.0%	8/108
2017	Northern Ireland Assembly 2017	9.1%	8/90
2017	General election 2017	7.9%	0/18
2019	European elections 2019	18.5%	1/3
2019	General election 2019	16.8%	1/18

Web links

• Alliance Party website

Individual evidence

1. ^ NI Executive: Alliance Party ruling council endorses justice ministry decision. BBC News, May 20, 2016, accessed February 22, 2017 . 
2. ↑ Who Won What When and Where? ark.ac.uk (Nicholas Whyte), January 1, 2015, accessed March 8, 2015 . 
3. ↑ Martin Melaugh, Fionnuala McKenna: CAIN Web Service: Results of Elections Held in Northern Ireland Since 1968. cain.ulst.ac.uk, February 9, 2014, accessed on March 8, 2015 . 
4. ↑ European election 2009. BBC News, June 14, 2004, accessed March 8, 2015 . 
5. ↑ European election 2009. BBC News, June 8, 2009, accessed March 8, 2015 . 
6. ↑ European election 2009. BBC News, May 27, 2014, accessed March 8, 2015 .