The SDLP held its two Westminster seats at the 2024 general election, neither gaining nor losing ground: Colum Eastwood held Foyle, his majority cut sharply as Sinn Féin pressed the seat, and Claire Hanna held Belfast South and Mid Down comfortably. Weeks later, on 29 August 2024, Eastwood resigned the leadership after nine years to concentrate on Foyle and on his New Ireland Commission, and Hanna succeeded him unopposed, ratified at the party conference on 5 October. The party that once led nationalist politics in Northern Ireland now sits fifth in the Assembly with eight MLAs and holds two Westminster seats, while Sinn Féin, which overtook it in 2001, is the largest party at every level. The constitutional-nationalist alternative the SDLP was built to be has been eclipsed by the abstentionist party it was designed to replace.
The 2024 manifesto set the party out as engaged nationalism: take the seats, take the oath under protest, sit on the Labour benches and use Parliament to press for investment and the repeal of the Troubles legacy legislation. Its two MPs do exactly that. Eastwood called the oath to the King "an empty formula"; Hanna sits on the Northern Ireland Affairs committee and speaks for the party on Europe and international affairs. The problem is scale: two MPs who turn up carry less weight in the chamber than the seven Sinn Féin members who stay away, because Sinn Féin has more than three times as many of them.
At Stormont the SDLP chose, when devolution was restored in February 2024, to form the official opposition under the 2016 reform act rather than take a department through the d'Hondt allocation, with Matthew O'Toole as leader of the opposition. Hanna has used the platform to argue for reform of the Assembly's sectarian designation vetoes and for a New Ireland Commission to build the case for unity by consent. It is a position that generates arguments while the Executive holds the budgets.
On Irish unity the manifesto set out a case for a referendum by consent, deliberately distinct from Sinn Féin's demand for a fixed 2030 date. In October 2025 Hanna urged the Irish government to begin planning for a border poll and to set up a dedicated unity ministry. Neither government has taken up either the SDLP's framework or Sinn Féin's timetable, and the Good Friday Agreement condition for a poll, a sustained majority for reunification, has not been shown to exist.
On economic and welfare policy the SDLP largely tracks Labour: end the funding squeeze, reform the fiscal framework, scrap the two-child benefit cap and the bedroom tax. Labour scrapped the cap in its November 2025 Budget, which is the party's whole strategy in miniature: by design it supports rather than opposes the government, so the wins it wants tend to arrive through Labour rather than through anything two SDLP MPs secured. On Europe it is the most openly pro-Windsor Framework voice in Northern Ireland, and Labour's partial EU reset in 2025 moved some way toward it, leaving little to argue about.
Hanna's own record is more striking than the party's current standing. She took Belfast South from the DUP's Emma Little-Pengelly, now Stormont's deputy First Minister, by more than 15,000 votes in 2019; she once resigned the SDLP whip over a proposed partnership with Fianna Fáil and considered leaving politics, then returned to hold her seat and take the leadership. She is the first leader since John Hume to sit at Westminster on a commanding majority.
The strategic bind is plain. The SDLP offers engagement where Sinn Féin offers abstention, and its argument, that sitting and doing the work delivers more than principled silence, is a reasonable one. But the nationalist electorate has chosen the abstentionist party by a wide margin, and repeatedly. The party's task before the next Assembly election, due in 2027, is to show that constitutional engagement can still win votes, not just make the better case for them.