However, in the 2018 general election, the party recorded a considerable change in its support base due to the inclusion of more indigenous Fijian candidates.

The merger took place in time for the party to participate in the 1965 constitutional conference which was called to map out a path towards independence from the United Kingdom.

The British Government decided to introduce cross-voting as a compromise between the Fijian and European delegates on one side and the Indians on the other; nine of the 36 seats on the Legislative Council would be elected by universal suffrage, but allocated by ethnicity, divided equally among Fijians, Indians, and general electors (which consist of Caucasians, Chinese, and other minorities).

The Alliance Party won 22 seats but the three independents and the two Council of Chiefs nominees joined it to give it a total strength of 27.

In protest at the new government's refusal to call a second constitutional conference, Patel led the nine Federation Party legislators in a mass walkout in September 1967.

The attempt to position itself as a multi-racial party failed to translate into significant electoral support in the indigenous Fijian community.

It did, however, manage to elect several Fijians to what became the House of Representatives after independence in 1970, owing to cross-voting in the renamed national constituencies.

There were those within the National Federation Party (NFP) who were not happy with the close relationship between Sidiq Koya and Ratu Kamisese Mara, the most notable of whom was R. D. Patel, but for the time being dissent was not being expressed openly.

Secondly when a former Alliance member moved a motion calling for the repatriation of people of Indian origin back to India, Koya was not happy with the measured response of the Alliance Government and accused it of "having elements which wanted to do legally what the Fijian Nationalist Party Leader, Sakeasi Butadroka, was trying to do illegally."

The inability of the NFP to make significant inroads into the ethnic Fijian vote kept the party in opposition in the years following independence.

In the March 1977 election, however, a split in the ethnic Fijian vote enabled the NFP to win a plurality in the House of Representatives.

In 1980, after Reddy criticised, Alliance's policy of reserving Crown land for use by ethnic Fijians only, he and Ratu Kamisese Mara were no longer on speaking terms.

Internal dissension reached a climax when a Koya supporter from Ba, Dr Balwant Singh Rakkha, was selected to contest the Lautoka seat vacated by Reddy's resignation.

In the Suva City Council election of October 1985, it failed to field any candidate and the FLP won most seats and occupied the Lord Mayor's chair.

In the by-election for the North Central National Seat (based in Ba district), brought about by the resignation of Vijay R. Singh, the Alliance won by a narrow margin over the FLP candidate, Mahendra Chaudhry.

For the 1987 election, therefore, they formed an electoral coalition with the Fiji Labour Party under the leadership of Timoci Bavadra, an ethnic Fijian.

The coalition won the election, but the new government was overthrown a month later in a military coup led by Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka.

When the government agreed to revise the Constitution in 1997, however, the NFP, now led by Jai Ram Reddy, played a key role in the ensuing negotiations, which resulted in the removal of the guaranteed ethnic Fijian majority from Parliament.

This may have been a tactical mistake: many Indo-Fijians had not forgiven Rabuka for his role in the overthrow of the Bavadra government and the subsequent drafting of a constitution that they widely considered to be racist, and the NFP, for the first time in 36 years, lost all of its seats in the House of Representatives.

The NFP contested the 2001 election, on a platform calling for the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to look into the Fiji coup of 2000, which had deposed the elected government of Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry, the removal of Value added tax from basic items, reduction of telephone and postal bills, national healthcare insurance for all workers, and consolidation of the independence of the judiciary.

The NFP ended up with only about ten percent of the popular vote and only one parliamentary seat – which it subsequently lost in a court challenge.

Its more significant victories included gaining control of the Nadi Town Council and re-electing Chandu Umaria as Mayor of Suva.

In the 2005 municipal polls, their performance was more modest, but Ba and Nadi remained in NFP hands, while an NFP/SDL coalition retained its hold on Sigatoka.

On 11 April 2005, Naidu announced that the NFP now regarded itself as a multiracial party and would attempt to win the support of all ethnic communities in Fiji.

At the party's annual conference attended by more than 600 delegates in Nausori on 31 July, Raman Pratap Singh, a lawyer and former parliamentarian, was elected to replace him.

A priority for the NFP was to attempt to revive sufficient support to gain Parliamentary representation in the general election scheduled for 2006.

At the August conference, the party decided that a preference deal with the ruling SDL in the parliamentary election scheduled for 2006 would be conditional on the government withdrawing its Reconciliation and Unity Bill.

Fiji Village reported on 9 March 2006 that Prime Minister Qarase had offered the NFP Cabinet posts, assuming the party won parliamentary representation, in exchange for a preference deal.

Nevertheless, a flurry of media speculation followed, with several major news services reporting in early September that the two parties were close to reaching a deal.

[11] On April 8, 2022, the party formed an electoral pact with the People's Alliance, led by Sitiveni Rabuka to contest the upcoming general election.