All of the 3 main parties saw their total votes fall, with Labour's total vote dropping by 2. 8 million on 1997, the Conservatives 1. 3 million, and the Liberal Democrats 428, 000.

The Liberal Democrats could point to steady progress under Charles Kennedy, gaining more seats than the main two parties – albeit only six overall – and maintaining the performance of a pleasing 1997 election, where the party doubled its number of seats from 20 to 46.

During 1988, the Liberals formally merged with the SDP to form the Liberal Democrats, though a small splinter Liberal Party was formed in 1989 by former members opposed to the merger.

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

Most SDP members voted in favour of the merger, but SDP leader David Owen objected and continued to lead a " rump " SDP, with the merger of the two parties being completed in March 1988 to form the Social and Liberal Democrats, becoming the Liberal Democrats in October 1989.

In 1988 the Liberals and Social Democrats merged to create what came to be called the Liberal Democrats.

In the 2005 general election, the Liberal Democrats elected 62 MPs to the House of Commons, a far cry from the days when the Liberals had just 5 MPs and Liberalism as a political force had seemed moribund.

As was the case with the Liberal Party for most of the 20th century, the Liberal Democrats face constant questioning about which of the other two parties they are closer to, in particular about which they would support in the event of a hung parliament.

After several days of negotiation, the Liberal Democrats agreed to join the Conservatives as part of a coalition government.

A group of Liberal opponents of the merger with the Social Democrats, including Michael Meadowcroft ( formerly Liberal MP for Leeds West ) and Paul Wiggin ( who served on Peterborough City Council as a Liberal ), continued under the old name of " the Liberal Party ".

This was legally a new organisation ( the headquarters, records, assets and debts of the old party were inherited by the Liberal Democrats ), but its constitution asserts it to be the same Liberal party.

Meadowcroft himself eventually joined the Liberal Democrats in 2007.

After a ballot of members and the passing of a motion at the 1987 Portsmouth conference, the party merged with the Liberal Party in 1988 to form the Liberal Democrats, although a minority left to form a continuing SDP led by David Owen.

* Liberal Democrats Home Affairs spokesman Mark Oaten resigns after it is revealed by the News of the World that he paid rentboys to perform sexual activities on him.

The 2010 general election resulted in a hung parliament ( Britain's first for 36 years ), following which the Conservatives ( led by David Cameron ), which had won the largest number of seats, formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats in order to gain a parliamentary majority, ending 13 years of Labour government.

In May, increasing pressure from the media and within the Liberal Party forced Holt to announce a parliamentary debate on the question of a second inquiry into the 1964 sinking of HMAS Voyager to be held on 16 May.

An enraged Holt interrupted St John's speech, in defiance of the parliamentary convention that maiden speeches are heard in silence ; his blunder embarrassed the government and further undermined Holt's support in the Liberal Party.

For example, the June 2004 election campaign of the Liberal Party of Canada was compared with " the Keystone Kops running around " by one of its parliamentary members, Carolyn Parrish.

* Radicals ( UK ), parliamentary progressives who were part of the nineteenth-century Liberal coalition

Janez Drnovšek of the center-left Liberal Democratic Party of Slovenia ( LDS ) was reelected Prime Minister in the 15 October 2000 parliamentary elections.

The UK, like several other states, has sometimes been called a " two-and-a-half " party system, because parliamentary politics is dominated by the Labour Party and Conservative Party, with the Liberal Democrats holding a significant number of seats ( but still substantially less than Labour and the Conservatives ), and several small parties ( some of them regional or nationalist ) trailing far behind in number of seats.

Since that time, the Labour and Conservatives parties have been dominant, with the Liberal Democrats also holding a significant number of seats and increasing their share of the vote in parliamentary general elections in the four elections 1992.

UK involvement was denied in an answer given to a parliamentary question posed by Richard Allan, Liberal Democrat MP.

( The independent Liberal parliamentary leadership was briefly taken over by the unknown Donald Maclean until Asquith, who had lost his seat like other leading Liberals, returned to the House at a by-election ).

The Liberal negotiators did not reveal this to their party and Labor was ultimately successful in winning their support to form a government, after signing a Charter of Good Government, pledging to restore services to rural areas, and promising parliamentary reforms.

It was later replaced by the National Liberal Party ( NLP ) which currently holds no parliamentary seats.

The parliamentary Radicals joined with a section of the Whig Party and the anti-protectionist Tory Peelites to form the Liberal Party by 1859.

Ascending to the throne in 1907, his early reign saw the rise of parliamentary rule in Sweden, although the leadup to World War I pre-empted his overthrow of Liberal Prime Minister Karl Staaff in 1914, replacing him with his own figurehead Hjalmar Hammarskjöld ( father of Dag Hammarskjöld ) for most of the war.

In the 1906 General Election, the Liberal Unionists ( both Free Traders and Tariff Reformers ) shared the same fate as their Conservative allies, with a big reduction in their parliamentary strength.

Devonshire died in 1908 but, despite the loss of the party's two most famous standard bearers, the Liberal Unionists were still able to increase their parliamentary representation in the two 1910 General Elections to 32 and then 36 MPs.

The writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal Unionist parliamentary candidate in 1900 and 1906, in the Scottish seats of Edinburgh Central and Hawick Boroughs respectively.

Popularly nicknamed " The Mongoose ", he was in government office almost continuously from 1807 until his death in 1865, beginning his parliamentary career as a Tory and concluding it as a Liberal.

Over the course of his 51-year federal parliamentary career ( and an additional seven years prior to that in a colonial parliament ), Hughes changed parties five times: from Labor ( 1901 – 16 ) to National Labor ( 1916 – 17 ) to Nationalist ( 1917 – 30 ) to Australian ( 1930 – 31 ) to United Australia ( 1931 – 44 ) to Liberal ( 1944 – 52 ).

* On Friday 20 April 2007, a Private Member's Bill aimed at exempting Members of Parliament from the Freedom of Information Act was ' talked out ' by a collection of MPs, led by Liberal Democrats Simon Hughes and Norman Baker who debated for 5 hours, therefore running out of time for the parliamentary day and ' sending the bill to the bottom of the stack.

He also oversaw Blair's first parliamentary defeat, when the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats and sufficient Labour Party rebels voted against government proposals to extend to 90 days the period that terror suspects could be held for without charge.

In 1976 Ashdown was selected as the Liberal Party's prospective parliamentary candidate in his wife's home constituency of Yeovil in Somerset, and took a job with Normalair Garrett, then part of the Yeovil-based Westland Group.

In 1992, the Liberal Democratic Party under Drnovšek's leadership won the parliamentary elections, but due to a high fragmentation of the popular vote had to ally itself with other parties in order to form a stable government.

In the milieu of parliamentary reform the duke of Newcastle evicted over a hundred tenants at Newark whom he believed supported directly or indirectly the Liberal / Radical candidate ( Wilde ) rather than his candidate ( Michael Sadler, a progressive Conservative ) at the 1829 elections.

A crowd waits outside Leeds Town Hall to see them elect a Liberal Party candidate during the United Kingdom general election, 1880 | 1880 general elections.

In 1957 this total fell to five when one of the Liberal MPs died and the subsequent by-election was lost to the Labour Party, which selected the former Liberal Deputy Leader Lady Megan Lloyd George as its own candidate.

Thousand Days War ( 1899 – 1902 ) cost an estimated 100, 000 lives, and up to 300, 000 people died during " La Violencia " ( The Violence ) of the late 1940s and 1950s, a bipartisan confrontation which erupted after the assassination of Liberal popular candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán.

A member of the Conservative Party, Pastrana defeated Liberal Party candidate Horacio Serpa in a run-off election marked by high voter turn-out and little political unrest.

Such speculation increased after Labour lost the 1983 Bermondsey by-election, in which Peter Tatchell was its candidate, standing against a Tory, a Liberal ( eventual winner Simon Hughes ) and the right wing John O ' Grady, who had declared himself the " real " Labour candidate and fought an openly homophobic campaign against Tatchell.

A safe seat is usually chosen ; while the Liberal and now defunct Progressive Conservative parties traditionally observed a convention of not running a candidate against another party's new leader in the by-election, the New Democrats and other smaller parties typically do not follow the same convention.

The Liberal and the Conservative parties agreed to alternate in the exercise of government power by presenting a joint National Front candidate to each election and restricting the participation of other political movements.

* Daniel Ortega Saavedra October 20, 1996 ' Lost as 669. 443 A total valid votes equivalent to 37. 75 %, well below that obtained by his main opponent on Arnoldo Aleman Lacayo candidate of the Liberal Alliance ( AL ) who won 904. 908 to obtain valid votes equivalent to 51. 03 %.

* Daniel Ortega Saavedra November 4, 2001 ' Lost as 915. 417 A total valid votes equivalent to 42. 30 %, well below that obtained by the main opposition Enrique Bolaños Geyer candidate Liberal Constitutionalist Party ( PLC ) who won by getting 1, 216, 863 valid votes equivalent to 56. 30 %.

* Daniel Ortega Saavedra November 5, 2006 ' won getting the 37. 99 % of the valid votes cast 930. 802 votes equivalent to relatively higher than the two forces princiapl opisitora presented at election they were the party of the Second Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance ( ALN ) with the degree candidate Eduardo Montealegre Rivas who won 693. 391 votes recorded corresponding to a 28. 30 % and third place went to the Constitutionalist Liberal Party with Dr. José Rizo Castellón who earned a total 664. 225 of valid votes corresponding to 27. 11 %.

* Daniel Ortega Saavedra November 6, 2011 ' Won In National Elections held on November 6, 2011 was the amount of 1, 569, 287 for 62. 46 % of the total valid votes, what became the Commander Daniel Ortega Saavedra in the presidential candidate who won more votes in a Presidential election in the history of Nicaragua, in addition to that obtained a lead of more than 30 % of valid votes doubling the number of votes obtained by radial businessman Fabio Gadea Mantilla on behalf of the Independent Liberal Party ( PLI ) who obtained the amount of 778. 889 votes recorded for 31. 00 %.

The big loser of these elections was the former President Arnoldo Aleman Lacayo candidate Liberal Constitutionalist Party ( PLC ) who was located in a distant third with a 5. 91 % equivalent to 148. 507 votes.

In the 1955 general election an old lady left her house in Shetland to vote Conservative but on returning to her house for her purse saw her father's photograph of Gladstone and instead went to the vote for the Liberal candidate, Jo Grimond.

Winchester is currently represented in the House of Commons through the Winchester Parliamentary Constituency by Steve Brine of the Conservatives who in the General Election of 2010 beat Martin Tod, the Liberal Democrat candidate, by 3048 votes ( a margin of 5. 4 %).

It was this case, which was hailed as a great victory throughout Wales, and his writings in Udgorn Rhyddid that led to his adoption as the Liberal candidate for Caernarfon Boroughs on 27 December 1888.

However, she was defeated by Country Liberal Party candidate Peter Adamson.

The Tammany bosses didn't think he was Mayor material, and they refused to nominate him as the Democratic candidate for the special election in November 1950, which instead went to highly regarded New York State Supreme Court Judge Ferdinand Pecora, who was also given the Liberal line.

To do so, the ALP would have to win Field's and Bunton's seats, and one seat in each territory, and have the second ACT seat fall to either a Labor candidate or an independent, former Liberal Prime Minister John Gorton, now estranged from his party.

The Liberal Party made a similar commitment, while independent candidate Nick Xenophon announced his intention to introduce tariff-based legislation as " a matter of urgency ".

After only one semester, Crane transferred to Syracuse University where he enrolled as a non-degree candidate in the College of Liberal Arts.

He also ventured into politics, unsuccessfully standing in the 1906 General Election as the Liberal Unionist Party's candidate for Dundee.

In 1886 he was persuaded to stand as a Unionist Liberal candidate for Newcastle, but was unsuccessful, coming third in the election.