Word: parliament
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...when the fat lady finally sang, the Conservatives got 336 seats and Labor 271 in the 651-member parliament. A handful of smaller parties took 25 seats between them...
...without these basic services for much longer. A near total absence of fuel -- a product of Azerbaijan's economic blockade of the enclave -- has left Karabakh's factories silent, its workers unemployed and without pay. Schools that have not been leveled are closed. The basement of the partially destroyed parliament building serves as the city's maternity ward, where nurses tend newborn babies by candlelight. A member of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which opened a station in Stepanakert three weeks ago, said he fears the city could soon be struck by hunger, and, as the weather warms...
...hung Parliament, the Liberal Democrats, who call the political center home, would be the object of intense wooing. Ashdown, 51, is ready. A comparative unknown on the national scene, he has been doggedly stumping the country pitching a message: Labour is a spent force, the Tories are uncaring, and "the realities of the ballot box" will make both parties "more realistic." As Ashdown defines it, realism is a fairer share of power for the movement that is heir to the great Liberal reformers of the 19th and early 20th centuries -- William Gladstone, Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George...
...were virtually illiterate. As he puts it, "Some were tougher, some stronger, some more intelligent, some more decent. Yet by accident of birth I was commanding them and not they me." He and his wife Jane settled in the Somerset town of Yeovil, from which Ashdown was elected to Parliament as a Liberal in 1983. After the 1987 collapse of the Liberal alliance with the Social Democrats -- mainly centrist defectors from Labour -- the two parties merged and chose Ashdown as leader...
...approval rating hovers around 16%, are not likely to gain a great deal more than the 22 seats they now have in the 650-seat House. If called to form a coalition Cabinet, however, they are prepared to exact a price: political autonomy for Scotland and Wales and a Parliament elected by proportional representation, the latter promising to give Ashdown's faithful greater clout. Since a proportional system would rob the major parties of strength, neither Major nor Kinnock favors it, though Labour has bowed to the idea of autonomy for Wales and restive Scotland. If a hung Parliament emerges...