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General elections were held in Fiji between 4 and 11 April 1987. [1] It was historic in that it marked the first electoral transition of power in Fijian history. The Alliance Party (Fiji) of the longtime Prime Minister, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, was defeated by a multiracial coalition, consisting of the Fiji Labour Party (contesting the election for the first time), the Indo-Fijian-dominated National Federation Party, and two smaller parties, the Western United Front and the Fiji Nationalist Party. In the House of Representatives, the coalition won a total of 28 seats to the Alliance's 24, and Dr Timoci Bavadra, the leader of the coalition, became Prime Minister.
Fiji, officially the Republic of Fiji, is an island country in Melanesia, part of Oceania in the South Pacific Ocean about 1,100 nautical miles northeast of New Zealand's North Island. Its closest neighbours are Vanuatu to the west, New Caledonia to the southwest, New Zealand's Kermadec Islands to the southeast, Tonga to the east, the Samoas and France's Wallis and Futuna to the northeast, and Tuvalu to the north. Fiji consists of an archipelago of more than 330 islands—of which 110 are permanently inhabited—and more than 500 islets, amounting to a total land area of about 18,300 square kilometres (7,100 sq mi). The most outlying island is Ono-i-Lau. The two major islands, Viti Levu and Vanua Levu, account for 87% of the total population of 898,760. The capital, Suva, on Viti Levu, serves as the country's principal cruise-ship port. About three-quarters of Fijians live on Viti Levu's coasts, either in Suva or in smaller urban centres such as Nadi—where tourism is the major local industry—or Lautoka, where the sugar-cane industry is paramount. Due to its terrain, the interior of Viti Levu is sparsely inhabited.
The Alliance Party, was the ruling political party in Fiji from 1966 to 1987. Founded in the early 1960s, its leader was Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, the founding father of the modern Fijian nation. Widely seen as the political vehicle of the traditional Fijian chiefs, the Alliance Party also commanded considerable support among the Europeans and other ethnic minorities, who, although comprising only 3–4% of Fiji's population, were over represented in the parliament. Indo-Fijians were less supportive, but the Fijian-European block vote kept the Alliance Party in power for more than twenty years.
Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, CF, GCMG, KBE is considered the founding father of the modern nation of Fiji. He was Chief Minister from 1967 to 1970, when Fiji gained its independence from the United Kingdom, and, apart from one brief interruption in 1987, the first Prime Minister from 1970 to 1992. He subsequently served as president from 1993 to 2000.
Bavadra's 28 member Parliamentary caucus included only 7 ethnic Fijians, all of them elected with predominantly Indo-Fijian support from "national" as opposed to "communal" electorates. (Fiji then had a complex voting system, allocating ethnic Fijians and Indo-Fijians 22 seats each, with a further 8 reserved for Europeans, Chinese, and other minorities. 12 of the representatives for both indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians group represented "communal" constituencies, elected from closed electoral rolls, while the other 10 represented "national" constituencies, elected by universal suffrage; the 8 minority seats comprised 3 communal and 5 national constituencies). Only six ethnic Fijians, including Dr Bavadra, were appointed to the new cabinet, as opposed to seven Into-Fijians and minority representatives. Effective Indo-Fijian domination of the government caused widespread resentment among the ethnic Fijian community, and after less than a month in office, the new government was deposed in on 14 May 1987 in a coup d'état led by Lieutenant-Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka.
Fijians are a nation and ethnic group native to Fiji, who speak Fijian and share a common history and culture.
National constituencies were a former feature of the Fijian electoral system. They were created as a compromise between demands for universal suffrage on a common voters' roll, and for a strictly communal franchise, with Parliamentary constituencies allocated on an ethnic basis and elected only by voters enrolled as members of specific ethnic groups.
Communal constituencies were the most durable feature of the Fijian electoral system. In communal constituencies, electors enrolled as ethnic Fijians, Indo-Fijians, Rotuman Islanders, or General electors vote for a candidate of their own respective ethnic groups, in constituencies that have been reserved by ethnicity. Other methods of choosing parliamentarians came and went, but this feature was a constant until their final abolition in the 2013 Constitution.
