The Liberals won, and Mackenzie remained prime minister until the 1878 election when Macdonald's Conservatives returned to power with a majority government.

In the general election of 1880 Disraeli's Conservatives were defeated by Gladstone's Liberals, in large part owing to the uneven course of the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

During World War I, the Liberals governed Britain through a coalition with the Conservatives, which ended in 1922.

In 1841 the Liberals lost office to the Conservative Party under Sir Robert Peel, but their period in opposition was short, because the Conservatives split over the repeal of the Corn Laws, a free trade issue, and a faction known as the Peelites ( but not Peel himself, who died soon after ), defected to the Liberal side.

Share of the vote received by Conservatives ( blue ), Whigs / Liberals / Liberal Democrats ( orange ), Labour ( red ) and others ( grey ) in general elections since 1832.

Ramsay MacDonald was forced into a snap election in 1924, and although his government was defeated, he achieved his objective of virtually wiping the Liberals out as many more radical voters now moved to Labour whilst moderate middle-class Liberal voters concerned about socialism moved to the Conservatives.

The party seemed finished and during this period some Liberals, such as Churchill, went over to the Conservatives, while others went over to Labour.

The Liberals gained ground, but once again it was at the Conservatives ' expense whilst also losing seats to Labour.

In 1931 MacDonald's government fell apart under the Great Depression, and the Liberals agreed to join his National Government, dominated by the Conservatives.

Another general election was called in 1951, and the Liberals were left with just six MPs in parliament ; all but one of them were aided by the fact that the Conservatives refrained from fielding candidates in those constituencies.

Through the 1950s and into the 1960s the Liberals survived only because a handful of constituencies in rural Scotland and Wales clung to their Liberal traditions, whilst in two English towns, Bolton and Huddersfield, local Liberals and Conservatives agreed to each contest only one of the town's two seats.

When the Labour government fell in 1979, the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher won a victory which served to push the Liberals back into the margins.

Although the SDP was seen as being largely a breakaway from the right wing of the Labour Party, an internal party survey found that 60 % of its members had not belonged to a political party before, with 25 % being drawn from Labour, 10 % from the Conservatives and 5 % from the Liberals.

Two political parties grew out of conflicts between the followers of Bolívar and Santander and their political visions — the Conservatives and the Liberals – and have since dominated Colombian politics.

During this decade and the one that followed, Urbina and his archrival, García Moreno, would define the dichotomy — between Liberals from Guayaquil and Conservatives from Quito — that remained the major sphere of political struggle in Ecuador in the 1980s.

In the Khaki Election of 1900, nationalist concern with the Boer War meant that the Conservatives and their Liberal Unionist allies gained a majority of Scottish seats for the first time, although the Liberals regained their ascendancy in the next election.

In the 1957 election, the Liberals won 200, 000 more votes nationwide than the Progressive Conservatives ( 40. 75 % Liberals to 38. 81 % PC ).

Some ministers wanted St. Laurent to stay on and offer to form a minority government, following the logic that the popular vote had supported them and even though their Parliamentary minority was smaller than the Conservatives, the Liberals ' more recent governmental experience would make them a more effective minority.

Initially invited by the Liberals in 1855 to join their struggle against the Conservatives, a United States adventurer named William Walker declared himself king in 1856.

The National Liberals refused to make this law permanent, while the Conservatives supported only the entirety of the bill and threatened to and eventually vetoed the entire bill in session because Bismarck would not agree to a modified bill.

With 379 seats compared to the Conservatives ' 132, the Liberals could confidently expect to pass their legislative programme through the Commons.

The Liberals pushed through parts of their programme, but the Conservatives vetoed or modified others.

It was seen as too partisan by many Liberals and the eventual referendum questions were not supported ; leading to the lowest ' yes ' vote count for any referendum in Australia ( in 1988 ).

For many years after the introduction of partisan politics in 1882, St. Boniface was a hotly-contested battleground riding between the provincial Liberals and Conservatives ( although candidates of the parliamentary left were also elected in the 1930s and 1940s ).

He was a strong supporter of Queen Caroline of Brunswick, and he visited Spain as a partisan of the Spanish Liberals against the Carlists.

The Liberals claimed they would manage the province's affairs in a businesslike rather than a partisan manner, an approach typified by Provincial Treasurer Edward Brown call for the province to " forget party for five years and get down to business ".

The business community feared the growing strength of the socialist CCF, and supporters of both the Liberals and the Conservatives argued that a united free market party was needed to keep the CCF from taking power.

The Manitoba Conservatives received their greatest support from the francophone community in the 1915 election, due to the fact that the party was seen as more supportive than the Liberals of francophone education rights.

Whiteway, however, who had been elected as a Conservative with the support of Protestants had lost the support of much of the business community with his support of the railway over the fishery and reached out to the Catholic Liberals In order to stay in power creating a cross denominational coalition.

The Conservatives were more supportive of francophone education rights than the Liberals, and received support from this community ; four of the party's five legislators were francophone.

These measures seemed to be supported by many in Manitoba's anglophone community, and the provincial Liberals were shut out in four crucial by-elections in early 1969.

Norquay was supported by both Liberals and Conservatives at the time, and McMillan was a prominent member of the Winnipeg Liberal community.

Strong support from the constituency's Indo-Canadian community was a factor, as was a provincial swing to the Liberals.

Singer did much to reunite Conservatives and Liberals in the community, and he himself preached at the Reform Synagogue in Manchester.

The Liberals now found themselves with 59 members holding the balance of power in a Parliament where Labour was the largest party but lacked an overall majority.

However, the situation in Western Australia and South Australia, where the party is more clearly differentiable from the Liberals, is quite different, with the Nationals narrowly missing out on winning a second seat in South Australia in 2006 and winning a safe Liberal seat in Western Australia in 2005.

Also impeding his progress was the Senate, where the Liberals had a large majority due to their previous long tenure in power.

The government's sharp cuts to government services were particularly resented in country Victoria, where the Liberals and their coalition partners, National Party held almost all the seats.

The Liberal Unionists managed to stay strong in the south-west of England, the West Midlands ( the centre of Chamberlain's power base ), and especially in Scotland, where the Liberal Unionists were initially the more dominant group in their alliance with the Scottish Conservatives against the Liberals.

In rural British Columbia, particularly in the Interior where the railway was the lifeblood of the local economy-the BC Liberals lost several contests because of discomfort that the electorate had with some of Campbell's policies, principally his promise to sell BC Rail.

The NDP's strategy had changed in that they were focusing their attacks on the Liberals rather than in 2004 where they criticized both the Liberals and Conservatives in equal measure prompting some criticism from Paul Martin.

In July 1832, with the backing of Liberals in Spain and England, an expedition led by Dom Pedro landed near Porto, which the Miguelites abandoned and where, after military activities including the Battle of Ponte Ferreira, Pedro and his associates were besieged by Miguelite forces for nearly a year.

The Liberals were able to occupy Lisbon, where Pedro moved from Porto and repulsed a Miguelite siege.

The Liberals occupied Portugal's major cities, Lisbon and Porto, where they commanded a sizable following among the middle classes.

However the progress of the SDP-Liberal Alliance as a whole was hampered with policy splits between the two parties, first over the miners ' strike ( 1984-5 ) where Owen and most of the SDP favoured a fairly tough line but the Liberals preferred compromise and negotiation.

Here Owen and the SDP favoured replacing of Polaris with Trident as a matter of some importance, where most Liberals were either indifferent to the issue or committed disarmers.

The party is fairly pro-European, and holds three seats in the European Parliament, where it sits as a member of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe ( ALDE ) group.

A counter-movement developed among the Danish population in northern Schleswig and ( from 1838 ) in Denmark, where the Liberals insisted that Schleswig as a fief had belonged to Denmark for centuries and that the Eider River, the historic border between Schleswig and Holstein, should mark the frontier between Denmark and the German Confederation or a new eventually united Germany.

In May 1910, Sifton and Saskatchewan Premier Walter Scott met with Laurier in Ottawa, where he was able to secure the Prime Minister's agreement that if the Liberals were re-elected in the 1911 federal election they would transfer to Alberta control over its resources.

The public was largely uninterested in the election, correctly surmising that it would be a repeat of previous elections where the regionally-divided nature of the country gave most of the seats in Ontario to the Liberal Party Ontario, in Western Canada to the Alliance, and in Quebec to the Bloc Québécois and Liberals.

From 1984 to 1991 he served as leader of the opposition in the Senate, where he was regarded as the primary opposition to Brian Mulroney's first term due to Mulroney's substantial majority in the Commons, with an opposition that was spread nearly equally between Turner's Liberals and Ed Broadbent's New Democratic Party.

The Liberal Army mistreated the population, most of whom it suspected of being Carlist sympathizers, to the point of, sometimes, attempted extermination ; Carlists, very often, treated Liberals no better than they had treated Napoleonic soldiers and agents ), to the point where the international powers forced the warring parties to recognize some rules of war, namely the " Lord Eliot Convention ".

The Tories were leading in the polls by early January 2006, and made a major breakthrough in Quebec where they displaced the Liberals as the second place party ( after the Bloc Québécois ).

On September 6th, 2012 two by-elections were held, one in Vaughan in which the Liberal Party was ushered back in, and another in Kitchener-Waterloo, where Elizabeth Whitmer's resignation gave the Liberals a chance for majority, however the Conservative riding elected Catherine Fife of the New Democratic Party ( NDP ), leaving McGuinty's Liberals with a minority government.

It would be the only Canadian federal election prior to 1993 where a party other than the Liberals or the ( Progressive ) Conservatives won the second most number of seats.

The Liberals had some early struggles, notably during one day in Montreal where three different costs were given for the proposed Liberal daycare program.