Cabinet of Fiji - The Multi-party Cabinet Provision

The Multi-party Cabinet Provision

Cabinet ministers are formally appointed by the president, but he is constitutionally required to do so only on the advice of the prime minister. An unusual feature of the Fijian constitution is its provision for a compulsory coalition cabinet — even if one party has a parliamentary majority in its own right. Every political party with more than 8 seats in the 71‑member parliament must be offered a proportionate number of cabinet posts. If the prime minister wishes to give cabinet posts to members of a party with fewer than 8 representatives, he must do so at the expense of his own party, not of other parties in the coalition. This provision was written into the 1997 Constitution with a view to forcing Fiji's political parties, which represented ethnic communities for the most part, to cooperate rather than compete for absolute power. In adopting this novel feature, Fijians noted that a similar system has been operating successfully in Switzerland for decades. More recently, it has been tried (with far less success) in Northern Ireland.