suffrage. At the constitutional conference in London in April 1970, the then-Prime Minister, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, strongly resisted pressure to reduce the General Electors' representation further, arguing that with the numbers of ethnic Fijians and Indo-Fijians so evenly balanced, they needed the minorities as a buffer between them. Politics may have been a factor, too: General Electors were strong supporters of Mara's Alliance Party: in six parliamentary elections over a twenty-year period, they never voted against it. In the wake of the 1987 coup, a new constitution was promulgated in 1990 aimed at enforcing and institutionalising ethnic Fijian dominance. General Electors' representation was reduced to 5 out of 71, but all were now elected on the closed roll, thereby increasing the influence of politicians responsible only to General Electors, whom the Fijian nationalists still saw as allies. A Constitutional review in 1997, however, agreed on a more equitable distribution. General Electors would be allocated 3 out of 46 "communal electorates," with the opportunity to contest, with all other groups, the 25 Open electorates. At any rate, with almost seven percent of the communal seats allocated to them, their representation was now close to their percentage of the Fijian population. Throughout the 1990s, General Electors generally supported the General Voters' Party (a reconstitution of what had been the European faction of the now-disbanded Alliance Party), and its successor, the United General Party, (now the United Peoples Party). In the 2001 election, however, they divided their three seats among three different parties. Subsequently, the United General Party leader, Millis Beddoes, was appointed Leader of the Opposition when the Fiji Labour Party leader, Mahendra Chaudhry, declined the position. This was the first time that a General Electors' representative had served in this capacity. A new constitution was promulgated in September 2013, abolishing ethnic representation in the newly constituted unicameral Parliament of Fiji. As a formal electoral constituency, the General Electors ceased to exist. References Ethnic groups in Fiji Politics of Fiji