page_title: Liberal Democrats (UK)
section_title: European elections
hierarchical_section_title: Liberal Democrats (UK) / Electoral results / European elections
caption_attribution_description: English: Graham Watson MEP
context_page_description: The Liberal Democrats are a liberal political party in the United Kingdom. The party has 11 Members of Parliament in the House of Commons, 89 members of the House of Lords, five Members of the Scottish Parliament and one member in both the Welsh Parliament and the London Assembly. It formed a UK coalition government with the Conservative Party from 2010 to 2015. In devolved governments, the Liberal Democrats are currently in coalition with Welsh Labour in the devolved Welsh government, and also served as the junior partner with Scottish Labour in the Scottish Government from 1999 to 2007.
  In 1981, an electoral alliance was established between the Liberal Party, a group which was the direct descendant of the 18th-century Whigs, and the Social Democratic Party, a splinter group from the Labour Party. In 1988, the parties merged as the Social and Liberal Democrats, adopting their present name over a year later. Under the leadership of Paddy Ashdown and later Charles Kennedy, the party grew during the 1990s and 2000s, focusing its campaigns on specific seats and becoming the third-largest party in the House of Commons.
context_section_description: As a pro-European party, the Liberal Democrats tended to fare badly at European Parliament elections. In the 2004 local elections their share of the vote was 29% (placing them second, ahead of Labour) and 14.9% in the simultaneous European Parliament elections (putting them in fourth place behind the UK Independence Party).  The results of the 2009 European elections were similar with the party achieving a vote of 28% in the county council elections yet achieving only 13.7% in the Europeans despite the elections taking place on the same day.  The 2009 elections did however see the party gain one seat from UKIP in the East Midlands region taking the number of representatives in the parliament up to 11. In 2014 the party lost ten seats, leaving them with one MEP. Campaigning on a pro-Remain platform with the slogan "Bollocks to Brexit", the party achieved their best ever results in the 2019 election, taking 19.6% of the vote and winning 16 seats.
  In the European Parliament from 2004 to 2019, the party sat with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) political group, which favoured further strengthening European integration.  The group's leader for seven and a half years was the South West England MEP Graham Watson, who was also the first Liberal Democrat to be elected to the European Parliament when he won the old Somerset and North Devon constituency in 1994. The group's current leader is the former Prime Minister of Belgium Guy Verhofstadt. Following the 2019 European elections, the Liberal Democrats joined Renew Europe, the successor group to the ALDE group.
caption: Graham Watson, former leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, was the Liberal Democrat MEP for South West England and the first Lib Dem to be elected to the European parliament
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