The DUP came out of the 2024 general election with five Westminster seats, down from eight in 2019 and its lowest total since 2001, when it first became the largest unionist party. The heaviest loss was North Antrim, where the TUV leader Jim Allister took the seat by 450 votes, ending a Paisley hold that had run since 1970. Lagan Valley, the seat Jeffrey Donaldson had held for 27 years, went to Alliance's Sorcha Eastwood, the first non-unionist to win it; South Antrim went to the UUP's Robin Swann. Of the five seats it kept, several were held narrowly. Gavin Robinson, who had become leader in March 2024 after Donaldson was charged with historic sexual offences, held Belfast East with an increased majority. For the first time, Sinn Féin finished ahead of the DUP in both seats and votes, completing its position as the largest Northern Ireland party at every level. The DUP entered the new Parliament no longer the largest unionist party at Westminster, and on its fourth leader in three years.

The manifesto's defining demand was the removal of the Irish Sea border and of EU law from Northern Ireland. The January 2024 Safeguarding the Union command paper had restored Stormont after a two-year DUP boycott, but it left the Windsor Framework and the sea border in place. Robinson, who had backed the deal, later said "cautious realism" would have been the wiser response, and several of the party's MPs thought it oversold. The Labour government has shown no interest in reopening the framework. The arrangement the DUP had collapsed Stormont to reverse is the one it now works within, and the boycott ended with less than it had demanded.

At Stormont the DUP's Emma Little-Pengelly serves as deputy First Minister to Sinn Féin's Michelle O'Neill, a power-sharing role the party spent decades resisting. Robinson has opposed reform proposals, backed by Alliance, that would replace the cross-community designation system with weighted-majority voting; the party's defence of cross-community consent is also a defence of the unionist veto that any such reform would remove.

The party's Westminster leverage has shrunk with its numbers. In 2017 its ten MPs held the balance of power under Theresa May and drew more than £1 billion in extra funding for Northern Ireland; a five-MP group on the backbenches has no comparable position, and the manifesto's ask of a lower Northern Ireland corporation tax, which would need Westminster legislation, has gone nowhere. Its opposition to the two-child benefit cap as it applied in Northern Ireland was met when Labour scrapped the cap in November 2025, an outcome the party can point to but did not secure.

Overshadowing all of it is the Donaldson case. On 22 June 2026 the former leader was found guilty of all eighteen charges against him, including rape, alongside thirteen counts of indecent assault and four of gross indecency, against two women who were children at the time, over a period from 1985 to 2008. He was remanded in custody to be sentenced in September, the judge indicating a lengthy prison term. It is the gravest criminal conviction of any party leader in Northern Ireland's history, and it leaves the party Donaldson led into the Safeguarding the Union deal facing unanswered questions about how long his conduct went unknown and whether any warning was missed.

What is left is a party arguing against a constitutional settlement Westminster will not change, from inside institutions it said were compromised, with too few MPs to shift either. The next test for Robinson is whether he can define what the DUP now stands for beyond opposition to arrangements it has already accepted, before the reckoning over his predecessor forces that question for him.