National Federation Party (Fiji) - Coalition With FLP

Coalition With FLP

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.