The National Federation Party is a Fijian political party founded by A.D. Patel in 1963. Though it claimed to represent all Fiji Islanders, it was supported, in practice, almost exclusively by Indo-Fijians whose ancestors had come to Fiji, mostly as indentured labourers, between 1879 and 1916.

The party played an important role in the negotiations that led to Fiji's independence from the United Kingdom in 1970. Their original demand for a universal franchise threatened to stall the independence process, but at a conference in London in April 1970, Patel eventually negotiated a compromise with Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, the leader of the Fijian Alliance, the main ethnic Fijian-dominated party. According to this compromise, ethnic Fijians and Indo-Fijians would each be allocated 22 seats in the 52 member House of Representatives, with a further 8 seats reserved for General electors (Europeans, Chinese, and other minorities). Approximately half of the seats reserved for each ethnic group would be elected from a closed electoral roll comprising only voters from that particular group; the remaining seats would be elected by universal suffrage.

The inability of the NFP to make significant inroads into the ethnic Fijian vote kept the party in opposition in the years following independence. In the March 1977 election, however, a split in the ethnic Fijian vote enabled the NFP to win a plurality in the House of Representatives. Internal dissension, however, prevented the party from forming a government, as the party fractured over disputes about the leadership and the allocation of ministerial positions. The Governor-General, Ratu Sir George Cakobau, reappointed the defeated Prime Minister, Ratu Mara, and ordered a new election for September that year, in which the NFP was heavily defeated. For more information, see Fiji Constitutional Crisis of 1977.

The party recovered sufficiently to come close to winning the 1982 election. By the mid-1980s, however, they had concluded that the ethnic Fijian community was not ready to accept an Indo-Fijian Prime Minister. For the 1987 election, therefore, they formed an electoral coalition with the Fiji Labour Party under the leadership of Timoci Bavadra, an ethnic Fijian. The coalition won the election, but the new government was overthrown a month later in a military coup led by Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka.

A new Constitution was promulgated, providing for a built-in ethnic Fijian majority in the legislature. This condemned the NFP to permanent opposition status. When the government agreed to revise the Constitution in 1997, however, the NFP, now led by Jai Ram Reddy, played a key role in the ensuing negotiations, which resulted in the removal of the guaranteed ethnic Fijian majority from Parliament. In the election that followed in 1999, the NFP surprised many observers by forming an electoral coalition with the Fijian Political Party , led by their former enemy, Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka. This may have been a tactical mistake: many Indo-Fijians had not forgiven Rabuka for his role in the overthrow of the Bavadra government and the subsequent drafting of a constitution that they widely considered to be racist, and the NFP, for the first time in 36 years, lost all of its seats in the House of Representatives. Its fortunes sank further in the 2001 election, in which it won only about ten percent of the popular vote and, again, no parliamentary seats. The party's refusal to agree to a preference deal with its one-time ally, the Fiji Labour Party, also worked against it. (Fiji has a system of preferential voting, similar to Australia's).

Recently, the party has attempted to modernize itself. Under the presidency of Dorsami Naidu , the party has made an effort to broaden its appeal to women and the disadvantaged. On 11 April 2005, Naidu announced that that NFP now regarded itself as a multiracial party and would attempt to win the support of all ethnic communities in Fiji.

External link

• http://www.goasiapacific.com/specials/fiji/partyprofiles_nfp.htm