The True Whig Party, also known as Liberian Whig Party, is the oldest political party in Liberia. Founded in 1869, the party dominated Liberian politics from 1878 until 1980 to the extent that the country was virtually a one-party state, although opposition parties were never outlawed.[1] Initially, its ideology was heavily influenced by that of the United States Whig Party.
The political party was founded in the township of Clay-Ashland in 1869.[2][3] It presided over a society where only Black American settlers and their descendants were citizens able to vote, and so represented them, often working in tandem with the Masonic Order. The party endorsed systems of forced labour. In 1930 they sold human labour to Spanish colonialists on Fernando Po (now Bioko in Equatorial Guinea), leading to a five-year U.S. and British boycott of Liberia. Despite this dispute, the West saw them as a stabilizing, unthreatening force and so invested heavily in the nation under William Tubman's leadership (1944–1971).
The party lost power after Tubman's successor, William Tolbert, was killed in an April 1980 coup by forces opposed to his clampdown on the political opposition and tolerance of corruption. It was then the opposition's turn to clamp down on the True Whig Party. The vast majority of its members and supporters left the party, but it struggled on as a minor party.
The party participated in the 2005 general election as part of the Coalition for the Transformation of Liberia, which dissolved the next year. It registered to compete as an individual party in the 2011 general election, while endorsing President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's bid for a second term.[4] However, it failed to nominate any candidate for any legislative seat.
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