The
True Whig Party, also known as
Liberian Whig Party, is the oldest
political party in
Liberia. Founded in 1869, the party dominated Liberian politics from 1878 until 1980 to the extent that the country was virtually a
one-party state, although opposition parties were never outlawed. Initially, its ideology was heavily influenced by that of the
United States Whig Party.
The political party was founded in the township of
Clay-Ashland in 1869. It presided over a society where Black American
settlers and their descendants were almost 100% of the
citizens able to vote, and so represented them, often working in tandem with the
Masonic Order. The party endorsed systems of
forced labour. In 1930 they sold human labour to Spanish colonialists on
Fernando Po (now
Bioko in
Equatorial Guinea), leading to a five-year U.S. and British boycott of Liberia. Despite this dispute, the
West saw them as a stabilizing, unthreatening force and so invested heavily in the nation under
William Tubman's leadership (1944–1971).
The party lost power after Tubman's successor,
William Tolbert, was killed in an April 1980 military coup by
soldiers opposed to his clampdown on the political opposition and his tolerance of
corruption. It was then the opposition's turn to clamp down on the True Whig Party; the vast majority of its members and supporters left the party, but it struggled on as a minor party.
In 1991, the party faced a challenge from a new group calling itself the "National True Whig Party of Liberia," and TWP chairman Momo Fahnbulleh Jones threatened legal action to induce the newly-founded party to change its name.
The party participated in the
2005 general election as part of the
Coalition for the Transformation of Liberia, which dissolved the next year. It registered to compete as an individual party in the
2011 general election, while endorsing President
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's bid for a second term. However, the party experienced strife over leadership five months before the election, and it failed to nominate any candidate for any legislative seat.