With all the speculation about what impact a large contingent of SNP MPs (or other regionally-based minor parties like the DUP) might have at Westminster after 7 May, it is worth looking at experience in some other countries. This situation may not be something the UK is used to, though it was key to how British politics worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century once the Parnell/Redmond Irish Party became the dominant electoral party in Ireland. There are more recent parallels from two other parliamentary systems with minority nationalities: Canada (and the Bloc Québecois), and Spain, particularly with Convergència i Unió but also other parties from Catalonia, and indeed the Basque Country and Galicia.
Canada
To make sense of what has happened in Canada, it’s necessary to know a bit how Canadian politics works. Federal and provincial party organisations are quite separate there, except for the New Democrats. The main party of Quebec ‘sovereignism’*, the Parti Québecois, has limited itself to Quebec provincial elections (as has the federalist Parti Libéral du Québec). Its counterpart for federal elections, the Bloc Québecois, was established in 1991, between the 1980 and 1995 referendums and after the failure of the Meech Lake process that was expected in Quebec to lead to a renewed form of federalism including a special status for Quebec. Its first leader, Lucien Bouchard, had been a minister in Brian Mulroney’s cabinet and an advocate for the Meech Lake deal. The Bloc was highly successful in its first election in 1993, winning 54 of 75 Quebec seats, and with the implosion of the Progressive Conservative Party it found itself forming the official opposition to the Liberals in the 1993-97 Parliament. It remained the dominant player in Quebec federal politics until 2011, winning over 40 seats in each election (and usually over 50) except for 2000, when it won 38.