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A big tent party, or catch-all party, is a term used in reference to a political party having members covering a broad spectrum of beliefs. [1] This is in contrast to other kinds of parties, which defend a determined ideology, seek voters who adhere to that ideology, and attempt to convince people towards it.
Following the 2018 Armenian parliamentary election, the My Step Alliance rose to power on an anti-corruption and pro-democracy platform. The alliance has been described as maintaining a big tent ideology, as the alliance did not support any one particular political position. Instead, it focused on strengthening Armenia's civil society and economic development. [2]
The Liberal Party of Australia and its predecessors originated as an alliance of liberals and conservatives in opposition to the Australian Labor Party, beginning with the Commonwealth Liberal Party in 1909. This ideological distinction has endured to the present day, with the modern Liberal Party frequently described as a "broad church", a term popularised by former leader and Prime Minister John Howard. In this context, "broad church" is largely synonymous with "big tent". In the 21st century, the party is often characterised as having a "small-l liberal" wing and a conservative wing, which frequently come into conflict with each other. The party has historically found strong support primarily from the middle-class, though it has in recent decades appealed to socially conservative working-class voters. [3] [4]
From its foundation the Justicialist Party has been a Peronist catch-all party, which focuses on the figure of Juan Perón and his wife Eva. Since Nestor Kirchner took the presidency in 2003, the party is considered as part of center-left coalition. It has divided into left-wing and right-wing factions, with left-wing populist Kirchnerists now dominating the party. Despite this, the right-wing faction still exists.
Juntos por el Cambio is an Argentine big tent political coalition. It was created in 2015 as Cambiemos. It is composed of Republican Proposal (centre-right), Civic Coalition ARI (centre) and Radical Civic Union (centre), with common goals to oppose Peronist parties. It is considered as part of center-right coalition.
In Bangladesh Awami League's Grand Alliance (Bangladesh) and BNP's 20 Party Alliance forms coalition with a wide range of parties, thus being catch all parties. [5]
In Brazil, the Centrão (lit. 'big centre') is a term for a large bloc of political parties that do not have a specific or consistent ideological orientation and whose aim is to maintain proximity to the executive branch in order to guarantee advantages and allow them to distribute privileges through clientelistic networks. [6] The Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) is one of the oldest and most notable "Centrão" and Big Tent parties in Brazil; despite being Brazil's largest party, both in number of members and number of officials elected, it has never elected a President, but has used its position as the largest party as a "bargaining chip" for privileges and advantages. [7] MDB was founded in 1965 at the start of the Brazilian military dictatorship as part of an enforced two-party system by the dictatorship, in which the only allowed parties were National Renewal Alliance Party (ARENA), a catch-all party representing the interests of the dictatorship, and MDB, formed to represent a wide-range moderate and less radical opposition to the dictatorship, without a clear program except the democratization of the country. [8] Other Big Tent centrão parties include the Progressists (PP), Brazilian Labour Party (PTB), We Can (PODE), Brazil Union (UB), Social Democratic Party (PSD), Social Christian Party (PSC), Act (AGIR), Patriot (PATRI), Forward (AVANTE), Solidarity (SD). [9]
At the federal level, Canada has been dominated by two big tent parties practicing "brokerage politics." [lower-alpha 1] [12] [13] [14] Both the Liberal Party of Canada and the Conservative Party of Canada (and its predecessors) have attracted support from a broad spectrum of voters. [15] [16] [17] Although parties such as the Quebec nationalist Bloc Québécois have elected members to the House of Commons, far-right and far-left parties have never gained a prominent force in Canadian society and have never formed a government in the Canadian Parliament. [18] [19] [10]
In Colombia, the presumed League of Anti-Corruption Governors, led by the former presidential candidate, sometimes referred to as "the Colombian Trump", has been described as a "catch-all party", [20] although analysts agree that it belongs to a more or less authoritarian right-wing. That is to say to a type of extreme right. [21] [22]
The centre-right National Coalition Party has been described as catch-all party supporting the interests of the urban middle classes. [23]
The Renaissance party (formerly La République En Marche!) founded by President Emmanuel Macron has been described as a centrist party with a catch-all nature. [24]
Both the Christian Democratic Union of Germany/Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) are considered big tent or catch-all parties, known in German as Volksparteien ("people's parties"). [25]
The Bharatiya Janata Party which is the ruling party of India since 2014 has made a successful coalition of diverse Indian communities of all caste, class and gender denominations. The Indian National Congress attracted support from Indians of all classes, castes and religions supportive of the Indian independence movement. [26] The Janata Party which came into power in India in 1977, was a catch-all party that consisted of people with different ideologies opposed to The Emergency. [27]
Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are considered catch-all parties and are supported by people from different social classes and political ideologies. [28] The two parties are usually described as being very similar in their current and recent policies, both being positioned on the centre-right with a liberal-conservative ideology. The reasons for their remaining separate are mainly historical, with those who supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty in the 1920s eventually becoming Fine Gael and those who opposed the treaty having joined Fianna Fáil to seek an independent Ireland.
In Italy, the Five Star Movement, founded and formerly led by the comedian and actor Beppe Grillo, has been described as a catch-all protest party and "post-ideological big tent" because its supporters do not share similar policy preferences, are split on major economic and social issues and are united largely based on "anti-establishment" sentiments. [29] The Five Star Movement's "successful campaign formula combined anti-establishment sentiments with an economic and political protest which extends beyond the boundaries of traditional political orientations", but its "'catch-all' formula" has limited its ability to become "a mature, functional, effective and coherent contender for government". [29] The Northern League attracted voters in its early years from all of the political spectrum. Forza Italia, on the centre-right, and the Democratic Party, on the centre-left, are considered to be catch-all parties and were mergers of political parties with numerous ideological backgrounds.[ citation needed ]
Historically, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had been formed as a big-tent party uniting groups ranging from Keynesian centrists to nationalist neoliberals. The party developed an intricate factional system to maintain co-operation and to ensure hegemonic success in elections. However, the party has seen some former factions defect or die out since the 1990s, especially the more moderate ones, which has led the party to shift overall towards the right.
The New Frontier Party, which existed from 1994 to 1997, was considered a big political party because it was created to oppose the LDP by people of various ideologies, including social democrats, liberals, neoliberals, Buddhist democrats, and conservatives. [30]
The former main centre-left opposition, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), was Japan's version of third way politics and served since the mid-1990s as a ‘big tent party’ for a plethora of heterogeneous groups ranging from two socialist parties to liberal and conservative groups. [31]
The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) held power in Mexico for 71 uninterrupted years, from 1929 to 2000. It was founded after the Mexican Revolution by Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles. Then known as the National Revolutionary Party, it was founded with the intent of providing a political space to allow all surviving leaders and combatants of the Mexican Revolution to participate and to resolve the grave political crisis that had been caused by the assassination of President-elect Álvaro Obregón in 1928. Throughout its nine-decade existence, the PRI has adopted a very wide array of ideologies, which have often been determined by the President of the Republic in office at the time. The party nationalized the petroleum industry in 1938 and the banking industry in 1982. In the 1980s, the party went through reforms that shaped its current incarnation, with policies characterized as centre-right, such as the privatization of state-run companies, closer relations with the Catholic Church, and embracing free-market capitalism and neoliberal policies. [32] [33] [34]
The National Regeneration Movement, founded by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has often been described as a big-tent party because of the various constituents who joined its ranks during the 2018 Mexican general elections. [35] [36] Juntos Hacemos Historia is a big-tent alliance led by the National Regeneration Movement that contested the 2021 Mexican legislative election. [37]
The centre-left Socialist Party (PS) and centre-right Social Democratic Party (PSD) have been described as catch-all parties. [38]
Romania's Social Democratic Party has been referred to as a catch-all party. Political analyst Radu Magdin described it in December 2016 as having conservative values, while being economically liberal, and espousing left-leaning rhetoric on public policies. [39]
Citizens (Spanish: Ciudadanos) has been considered as an example of astroturfing in the Spanish media since 2015. Originally founded as a social-democratic regional party opposed to Catalan nationalism, the party switched to a catch-all message to attract votes from the right to the moderate left in the party's appearance in the national political landscape. Its stance includes a mix of liberalism and pro-Europeanism, but the party has also embraced populist views on the legitimacy of its political opponents; conservative views on topics such as the criminal system and personal property and Spanish nationalist positions; and many problems by its own leader, Inés Arrimadas. It has become one of the most recognisable catch-all parties in the history of the country. In the mid-2010s, however, the party's main ideology is perceived to have drifted towards the right, with Albert Rivera admitting that it would not agree to form a coalition with the two main centre-left and left parties after the April 2019 Spanish general election, regardless of the results. [40] [41] [42] Furthermore, some commentators argue that Ciudadanos was attempting to supplant the People's Party, which suffered massive losses as the hegemonic party of the right and thus contributed to the shift in Ciudadanos to the right. Similarly, Ciudadanos has allied with both the conservative People's Party and the far-right Vox to achieve coalitions in regional parliaments. That has given rise to the expression "the three rights" or colloquially "El Trifachito" to describe the grouping, which defines its opposition as "the left".
The African National Congress (ANC) has been the governing party of South Africa since the country's first democratic election, in 1994, and it has been described by the media as a "big tent" party. [43] [44] [45] [46] An important aspect of its electoral success has been its ability to include a diverse range of political groups most notably in the form of the Tripartite Alliance between the ANC; the South African Communist Party; and the country's largest trade union, COSATU. [44] Additional interest groups in the party are members of the business community and traditional leaders.
When Gordon Brown became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 2007, he invited several members from outside the Labour Party into his government. They included former CBI Director-General Digby Jones who became a Minister of State and former Liberal Democrats leader Paddy Ashdown who was offered the position of Northern Ireland Secretary (Ashdown turned down the offer). [47] [48] The media often referred to Brown's ministry as "a government of all the talents" or simply "Brown's big tent". [49]
In Scotland, the Scottish National Party is possibly the longest-established big-tent party in the UK, with the goal of seeking Scottish independence by those that support various other political ideologies and from various political positions. Since 2007, the SNP have been the largest single party in the Scottish Parliament and has formed the Scottish government continuously since the 2007 Scottish general election.
All for Unity was a big tent anti-SNP electoral alliance that contested the 2021 Scottish Parliament election but failed to win any seats. [50]
The Democratic Party was a "big-tent" party during the New Deal coalition, which was formed to support President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies from the 1930s to the 1960s. [51] The coalition brought together labor unions, working-class voters, farm organizations, liberals, Southern Democrats, African Americans, urban voters, and immigrants. [52] [53]
After the 1974 Dallas Accord, the Libertarian Party embraced the big-tent idea to the extent it ensured that the anarcho-capitalist views would not be excluded from the majority minarchist party. [54]
Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilisation in which it appears. In Western culture, depending on the particular nation, conservatives seek to promote and preserve a range of institutions, such as the nuclear family, organised religion, the military, the nation-state, property rights, rule of law, aristocracy, and monarchy. Conservatives tend to favour institutions and practices that enhance social order and historical continuity.
The Civic Platform is a centre-right liberal conservative political party in Poland. Since 2021, it has been led by Donald Tusk, who previously led it from 2003 to 2014 and was President of the European Council from 2014 to 2019.
Social conservatism is a political philosophy and a variety of conservatism which places emphasis on traditional social structures over social pluralism. Social conservatives organize in favor of duty, traditional values and social institutions, such as traditional family structures, gender roles, sexual relations, national patriotism, and religious traditions. Social conservatism is usually skeptical of social change, instead tending to support the status quo concerning social issues.
People's Union was a Flemish nationalist political party in Belgium, formed in 1954 as a successor to the Christian Flemish People's Union.
The Union for French Democracy was a centre-right political party in France. The UDF was founded in 1978 as an electoral alliance to support President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in order to counterbalance the Gaullist preponderance over the political right in France. This name was chosen due to the title of Giscard d'Estaing's 1976 book, Démocratie française.
The left–right political spectrum is a system of classifying political positions, ideologies and parties, with emphasis placed upon issues of social equality and social hierarchy. In addition to positions on the left and on the right, there are centrist and moderate positions, which are not strongly aligned with either end of the spectrum. It originated during the French Revolution based on the seating in the French National Assembly.
The Brazilian Democratic Movement is a Brazilian political party. It is considered a "big tent party" and it is one of the parties with the greatest representation throughout the national territory, with the most numbers of senators, mayors and city councillors, always having formed a large part of the National Congress since 1988, and also has the largest number of affiliates, with 2,043,709 members as of July 2023.
The Social Democratic Party is a liberal-conservative political party in Portugal that is currently the country's ruling party. Commonly known by its colloquial initials PSD, on ballot papers its initials appear as its official form PPD/PSD, with the first three letters coming from the party's original name, the Democratic People's Party. A party of the centre-right, the PSD is one of the two major parties in Portuguese politics, its rival being the Socialist Party (PS) on the centre-left.
The Independence Party is a conservative political party in Iceland. It is currently the largest party in the Alþingi, with 17 seats. The chairman of the party is Bjarni Benediktsson and the vice chairman of the party is Þórdís Kolbrún R. Gylfadóttir.
Political colours are colours used to represent a political ideology, movement or party, either officially or unofficially. They represent the intersection of colour symbolism and political symbolism. Politicians making public appearances will often identify themselves by wearing rosettes, flowers, ties or ribbons in the colour of their political party. Parties in different countries with similar ideologies sometimes use similar colours. As an example the colour red symbolises left-wing ideologies in many countries, while the colour blue is often used for conservatism, the colour yellow is most commonly associated with liberalism and right-libertarianism, and Green politics is named after the ideology's political colour. The political associations of a given colour vary from country to country, and there are exceptions to the general trends, for example red has historically been associated with Christianity, but over time gained association with leftist politics, while the United States differs from other countries in that conservatism is associated with red and liberalism with blue. Mass media has driven a standardisation of colour by political party, to simplify messaging, while historically the colour a candidate chose to identify with could have been chosen based on other factors such as family or regional variations.
Liberal conservatism is a political ideology combining conservative policies with liberal stances, especially on economic issues but also on social and ethical matters, representing a brand of political conservatism strongly influenced by liberalism.
This article gives information on liberalism worldwide. It is an overview of parties that adhere to some form of liberalism and is therefore a list of liberal parties around the world.
Citizens' Movement is a Mexican centre-left political party. The party was founded in 1999, under the name Convergence for Democracy, which was then shortened to Convergence in 2002 and changed to Citizens' Movement in 2011.
Conservative liberalism, also referred to as right-liberalism, is a variant of liberalism combining liberal values and policies with conservative stances, or simply representing the right wing of the liberal movement. In the case of modern conservative liberalism, scholars sometimes see it as a more positive and less radical variant of classical liberalism; it is also referred to as an individual tradition that distinguishes it from classical liberalism and social liberalism. Conservative liberal parties tend to combine economically liberal policies with more traditional stances and personal beliefs on social and ethical issues. Ordoliberalism is an influential component of conservative-liberal thought, particularly in its German, British, French, Italian, and American manifestations.
Syncretic politics, or spectral-syncretic politics, combine elements from across the conventional left–right political spectrum. The idea of syncretic politics has been influenced by syncretism and syncretic religion. The main idea of syncretic politics is that taking political positions of neutrality by combining elements associated with left-wing politics and right-wing politics can achieve a goal of reconciliation.
Citizens, officially Citizens–Party of the Citizenry, is a liberal political party in Spain.
The Liberal Party is a conservative political party in Brazil. From its foundation in 2006 until 2019, it was called the Party of the Republic.
Progressivism is a left-leaning political philosophy and movement that seeks to advance the human condition through social reform – primarily based on purported advancements in social organization, science, and technology. Adherents hold that progressivism has universal application and endeavor to spread this idea to human societies everywhere. Progressivism arose during the Age of Enlightenment out of the belief that civility in Europe was improving due to the application of new empirical knowledge.
Centrism is a political ideology associated with moderate politics placed between left-wing politics and right-wing politics on the left–right political spectrum. Various centrist movements have developed in different countries, based on the specific country's political environment.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)two historically dominant political parties have avoided ideological appeals in favour of a flexible centrist style of politics that is often labelled "brokerage politics"
...most Canadian governments, especially at the federal level, have taken a moderate, centrist approach to decision making, seeking to balance growth, stability, and governmental efficiency and economy...
Canada's party system has long been described as a "brokerage system" in which the leading parties (Liberal and Conservative) follow strategies that appeal across major social cleavages in an effort to defuse potential tensions.
First Past the Post in Canada has favoured broadly-based, accommodative, centrist parties...
The initial period of party system change found its first culmination in 1996 when a new catch-all party, the Shinshinto (New Frontier Party), got founded by Ozawa and others.
The former main centre-left opposition, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), was Japan's version of third way politics and served since the mid-1990s as a 'big tent party' for a plethora of heterogeneous groups ranging from two socialist parties to liberal and conservative groups.
Morena's star has risen so quickly because it offers refuge to such a wide range of beliefs and ideologies. The party has room for old guard supporters of Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, young leftist academics, former PRI leaders, evangelical Christians, actors, athletes, and even the odd business tycoon or two. In this way the party resembles the big tent of the PRI, which more than a guiding philosophy was guided by the administration of political power.
In a few months, he has assembled a coalition stretching from socially conservative Christian evangelicals to admirers of socialist Venezuela and business tycoons, each with contrasting visions for Mexico. Dozens of lawmakers from across the political spectrum have switched sides to join Lopez Obrador's National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), a party that is not yet four years old.
...GD as a catch-all movement...
Both major parties in the Armenian parliament [Republican Party and Prosperous Armenia] represent elite groups. With almost no ideology to speak of, they are catch-all parties, a phenomenon becoming typical in the modern world.
