Primary election

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Party primaries or primary elections are elections where a political party selects a candidate for an upcoming general election. Depending on the country and administrative division, voters may consist of all voters open primary, or solely the members of a political party in what is called a closed primary. In addition to these, there are other variants on primaries (which are discussed below) that are used by many countries holding elections throughout the world.

The origins of primary elections can be traced to the progressive movement in the United States, which aimed to take the power of candidate nomination from party leaders to the people.^[1] However, political parties control the method of nomination of candidates for office in the name of the party. Other methods of selecting candidates include caucuses, internal selection by a party body such as a convention or party congress, direct nomination by the party leader, and nomination meetings.

Parties in countries using the parliamentary system sometimes have an equivalent process, a leadership election, where party members elect the leader of their political party. A party's leader will typically become the head of government should their party win a majority of seats. Thus, a leadership election is also often considered to be one for the party's de facto candidate for prime minister or premier just like a primary.

However, Prime Ministerial primaries have been held in inter-party electoral alliances, such as the 2021 Hungarian opposition primary, and also in cases where a single party opted to retain its leader but select someone else as its Prime Ministerial candidate, as the Portuguese Socialist Party has done in 2014.

The inverse may also happen; the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan automatically bestows the party's internal leadership on a sitting DPP president.