A few days before I saw your mention of what Texas Liberals were doing to promote `` Louis Capet '' ( The Week '', June 3 ), another analogy had occurred to me.

While Disraeli's government survived until the December general election, the initiative had passed to the Liberals, who were returned to power with a majority of 170.

David Lloyd George adopted a programme at the 1929 general election entitled We Can Conquer Unemployment !, although by this stage the Liberals had declined to third-party status.

The Liberals were reduced to a mere forty seats in Parliament, only seven of which had been won against candidates from both parties and none of these formed a coherent area of Liberal survival.

In doing so the bulk of Liberals remained supporting the government, but two distinct Liberal groups had emerged within this bulk – the Liberal Nationals ( officially the " National Liberals " after 1947 ) led by Simon, also known as " Simonites ", and the " Samuelites " or " official Liberals ", led by Samuel who remained as the official party.

Yet there were a few recruits, such as Clement Davies, who had deserted to the National Liberals in 1931 but now returned to the party during the World War II and who would lead it after the war.

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.

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.

Apart from this, when no party has had a majority, minority governments normally have been formed with one or more opposition parties agreeing to vote for the legislation governments need to function, as the Labour government of James Callaghan formed a coalition with the Liberals in 1977 when it lost its narrow majority gained at the October 1974 election.

However, his health was evidently far from perfect at the time of his death — he had collapsed in Parliament earlier in the year, apparently suffering from a " vitamin deficiency ", and this raised fears among some senior Liberals that he might have a heart condition.

Ironically, Peter Hain had served as president of the Young Liberals when they called for the impeachment of Mr. Murray in 1977.

While the Liberals lost several seats, they still had 111 more seats than the Tories, enabling them to dominate the Canadian House of Commons.

The 1956 Pipeline Debate led to the widespread impression that the Liberals had grown arrogant in power when the government invoked closure on numerous occasions in order to curtail debate and ensure that its Pipeline Bill passed by a specific deadline.

Because the Liberals were still mostly classically liberal, Diefenbaker promised to outspend the incumbent Liberals, who campaigned on plans to stay the course of fiscal conservatism they had followed through St-Laurent's term in the 1940s and 1950s.

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.

The Liberals won a majority in their own right in both elections — something not even Holt or Robert Menzies had been able to achieve.

Previously this plan had been dismissed by the Queensland branch of the Liberal party, but the idea received in-principle support from the Liberals.

This marked a rapid decline in the support of the National Liberals, and by 1879 their close ties with Bismarck had all but ended.

Although the Liberals had advocated the same land-sale policy, the unpopularity of the sales and evidence of pervasive government corruption produced a tremendous outcry from the opposition.

The Liberals had disbanded Caballero's army when they came to power and organized a completely new one.

Paraguay's dispute with Bolivia over the Chaco, a struggle that had been brewing for decades, finally derailed the Liberals.

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

The Liberals won a large majority in the 1880 election.

This would prove the last time the Liberals won a majority in their own right.

In the 1918 general election Lloyd George, " the Man Who Won the War ", led his coalition into another khaki election, and won a sweeping victory over the Asquithian Liberals and the newly emerging Labour Party.

At the 1922 and 1923 elections the Liberals won barely a third of the vote and only a quarter of the seats in the House of Commons, as many radical voters abandoned the divided Liberals and went over to Labour.

There, the Liberals won a seat in the London suburbs for the first time since 1935.

In the October 1974 general election the Liberals slipped back slightly and the Labour government won a wafer-thin majority.

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.

In the 2005 election it won 18 out of 179 seats in the Folketing and became a junior partner in coalition with the Liberals.

The Liberals won 190 seats — the most in Canadian history at the time, and still a record for the party.

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

In the 2010 Parliamentary election, the Communists won 42 seats, while the Liberal-Democrats won 32, the Democratic Party won 15, and the Liberals won 12.

Although the Liberals had successfully led Paraguay's occupation of nearly all the disputed territory and had won the war when the last truce went into effect, they were finished politically.

An election was called for 13 December, which the Liberal Party won in its own right ( although the Liberals governed in a coalition with the Country Party ).

The polarization did take place and while the Liberals remained active under Lloyd George, they won few seats and were a minor factor until they joined a coalition with the Conservatives in 2010.

King's Liberals originally had a bare majority position, however, since they had won 118 out of 235 seats, exactly the minimum for a majority.

In 1880, the Liberals won again and the Liberal leaders, Lord Hartington ( leader in the House of Commons ) and Lord Granville, retired in Gladstone's favour.

On that occasion the party won 48. 5 % of the vote, but, despite its absolute majority in the Italian Parliament, De Gasperi continued to govern at the head of a centrist coalition that included the Italian Workers ' Socialist Party ( PSLI-a 1947 break-away from the PSI ), the Liberals and the Republicans.

The election of 1974 saw Trudeau and the Liberals re-elected with a majority government with 141 of the 264 seats.

When Labour won more seats ( though fewer votes ) than the Conservative Party in February 1974 and Heath was unable to persuade the Liberals to form a coalition, Wilson returned to 10 Downing Street on 4 March 1974 as Prime Minister of a minority Labour Government.

The Stanfield-led Progressive Conservatives lost the 1974 election to the Pierre Trudeau-led Liberals.

However, prior to that, Somoza worked out an agreement allowing him to stand for re-election in 1974 ; he would be replaced as president by a three-man junta consisting of two Liberals and one Conservative while retaining control of the National Guard.

In March 1977, he led the Liberals into the " Lib-Lab pact " by which they agreed to keep the Labour government, whose narrow majority since the general election in October 1974 had been gradually eroded and left them as minority government, in power in return for a degree of prior consultation on policy.

Implementing bilingualism had hurt the popularity of the Liberals significantly, as English-Canadians were not receptive and viewed it as a waste of money, but Stanfield did not ( or would not ) capitalize upon that by opposing it, even with the 1974 election approaching after the Liberals had lost a motion of non-confidence.

After the period known as La Violencia the Liberals and the Conservative Party reached an agreement to share power from 1958 to 1974 in the so-called National Front agreement that followed the fall of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla.

Regan's Liberals won a minority government in 1970, and were re-elected with a majority in 1974.

However, following the success of the Liberals in the by-elections held between the 1970 and February 1974 general elections, the swingometer was reduced in scale to just a small standby as the computers used by the BBC were deemed more reliable.

The Trudeau Liberals won a large majority government in the resulting 1974 federal election.

Rodriguez was re-elected in the 1974 election, in which the Liberals won a majority government.

Mayhew had been feeling increasingly uneasy with Labour policies under Harold Wilson and in 1974, he defected to the Liberals, being the first Member of Parliament to cross the floor to the Liberals in several decades.

He served as Minister of Youth from 1974 to 1982 and as Minister of Education from 1985 to his defeat in the 1987 election which saw the Liberals take power.

Its Labour MP Christopher Mayhew defected to the Liberals in 1974 before being defeated, and his Labour successor, John Cartwright, defected to the SDP in 1981.

He was a member of Parliament from 1946 to 1959 for the Social Democratic Party and People's Alliance and then from 1963 to 1974 for the People's Alliance, as an independent and also the Union of Liberals and Leftists ().

Finally he was chairman of Union of Liberals and Leftists from 1969 to 1974.