Quote:
Originally Posted by Itse
Are any of those actual splinter movements?
The tea party certainly wasn't.
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The Canadian examples are pretty much the definition of splinter parties dragging the main party to the extremes.
A brief history of the two parties;
The Reform party was a federal splinter party that ran against the traditional Progressive Conservatives. They actually won more seats then the traditional party forming official opposition, but the Liberals still won elections amid some typical liberal scandals, so the parties decided to merge into the Alliance with I'm going to say was 2/3 of the way right between the PCs & The Reforms. The Alliance did terrible electorally and rebranded itself The Conservative Party which tacked back to the left a bit about half way between the Reforms and the old PCs (dropping progressive from their title).
The Wild Rose ran against the provincial progressive conservative party, from a position to the right of the median republican (which is saying something, because in the 90s US democrats were to the right of Canadian PCs), again the PCs won government and the WR won official opposition twice. Then there was a backlash election to have two conservative parties running the government, and our unionist New Democrat Party won a governing majority. While neither of Conservatives parties were in power they merged into the United Conservative Party and won a supermajority in the next election. I would say about 75 - 90 % of the way to the WR. They are now basically US republicans, which in Canada I would define as right wing extremists and there is no credible conservative movement in Alberta right now, because the splinter party dragged them so far to the right.
With Alberta being the heartland of the Canadian conservative movement, the UPC party has actually dragged the slightly more moderate federal conservative party to the right, who is doing well with some of the divisive rhetoric the republicans are using in Canadas version of the rust belt (suburban Ontario). So the provincial splinter party had even managed to drag the federal party to the right.