Alliance went into the 2024 general election with one Westminster seat and came out with one, but not the same seat. Stephen Farry, the deputy leader, lost North Down to the independent unionist Alex Easton, who took it comfortably. Sorcha Eastwood took Lagan Valley from the DUP with 18,618 votes and a majority of 2,959, the first non-unionist ever elected for a seat Jeffrey Donaldson had held for 27 years. Naomi Long, the party leader, ran in Belfast East and lost again to the DUP's Gavin Robinson, whose majority went up. Away from Westminster the party is steadier: third-largest in the Assembly with 17 MLAs, 67 council seats after the 2023 locals, and the justice ministry at Stormont. The 2024 manifesto promised structural reform of the institutions Alliance works inside. Nearly two years on, the case has been made repeatedly and the institutions are unchanged.
The paradox at the centre of the party is real. Alliance opposes the designation system that makes Assembly members register as unionist, nationalist or other; Alliance itself designates as "other." The justice ministry it holds exists on separate terms precisely because the DUP and Sinn Féin agreed in 2008 that neither would nominate to it, which is why the post falls to a cross-community vote that Alliance can win. Naomi Long has held it since February 2024, as she did from 2020 to 2022. The system Alliance wants dismantled is the same one that hands it its only department. Abolishing the rules would remove the reason the party is in office. That is either principle or self-defeat, and the party has never had to resolve which, because the reform has not come close to happening.
On Stormont reform the manifesto set out the full list: end designations, replace the petition of concern with weighted-majority voting, change how the first and deputy first ministers are nominated, and cap political donations. Long has restated it through 2025 and 2026 and warned that dysfunctional government cannot be allowed to run on indefinitely. The DUP has rejected the package as majority rule by another route. The problem is arithmetic as much as politics: the reform needs the consent of the parties whose vetoes it would strip out, and neither the DUP nor Sinn Féin will surrender its own. Westminster has shown no appetite to impose a settlement over their heads. Stormont has spent years of the period since the Good Friday Agreement collapsed, the dysfunction is not in dispute, and the parties that gain from it hold the power to block its repair.
At Westminster the single Alliance MP sits on the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee. Eastwood drew notice with a sharp intervention over the government's appointment of Peter Mandelson, telling the Commons he "wouldn't have survived the vetting for a kids' football club", a sign that one MP can land a blow when the line is good, though one vote in 650 is the ceiling on what that buys.
Europe is the one area where Alliance's position has visibly shaped government thinking. The party is among the most openly pro-Windsor Framework voices in Northern Ireland, arguing the Framework protects the region's access to both the UK and EU markets, and Labour's partial EU reset in May 2025, including movement on Erasmus and a veterinary agreement, ran in the direction Alliance has been pushing. On welfare the pattern is the opposite: the manifesto opposed the two-child benefit cap, and Labour scrapped it in the November 2025 Budget, so the headline win arrived from London rather than from anything Alliance did.
The next real test is the 2027 Assembly election. Alliance won 17 seats in 2022, more than double its 2017 total, and the question is whether that is a ceiling or a base. Surveys of national identity now put those who call themselves neither unionist nor nationalist as the largest single group, which is the bloc Alliance speaks for. Its problem is mechanical: it has to convert a growing "neither" electorate into seats under a system built around a binary it rejects. Alliance did not break its manifesto. It argued the reform case consistently, ran the justice ministry without incident, and broke into a unionist stronghold for the first time. What it has not done, after two decades of making the same argument, is move the institutions. The 2027 result will show whether the electorate is shifting fast enough to force the parties that benefit from the status quo to give any of it up.