Editing Conservative Party (UK) (section)

=== International affiliation ===
The Conservative Party is a member of a number of international organisations, most notably the [[International Democracy Union]] which unites right-wing parties including the United States [[Republican Party (United States)|Republican Party]], the [[Liberal Party of Australia]], the [[Conservative Party of Canada]] and the South Korean [[People Power Party (South Korea)|People Power Party]].

At a European level, the Conservatives are members of the [[European Conservatives and Reformists Party]] (ECR Party), which unites conservative parties in opposition to a federal [[European Union]], through which the Conservatives have ties to the [[Ulster Unionist Party]] and the governing parties of Israel and Turkey, [[Likud]] and the [[Justice and Development Party (Turkey)|Justice and Development Party]] respectively. In the European Parliament, the Conservative Party's MEPs sat in the [[European Conservatives and Reformists Group|European Conservatives and Reformists]] Group (ECR Group), which is affiliated to the ACRE. Party leader David Cameron pushed the foundation of the ECR, which was launched in 2009, along with the Czech [[Civic Democratic Party (Czech Republic)|Civic Democratic Party]] and the Polish [[Law and Justice]], before which the Conservative Party's MEPs sat in the [[European Democrats]], which had become a subgroup of the [[European People's Party (European Parliament group)|European People's Party]] in the 1990s. Since the [[2014 European election]], the ECR Group has been the third-largest group, with the largest members being the Conservatives (nineteen MEPs), Law and Justice (eighteen MEPs), the [[Liberal Conservative Reformers]] (five MEPs), and the [[Danish People's Party]] and [[New Flemish Alliance]] (four MEPs each). In June 2009 the Conservatives required a further four partners apart from the Polish and Czech supports to qualify for official [[Political groups of the European Parliament|fraction]] status in the parliament; the rules state that a European parliamentary caucus requires at least 25 [[MEPs]] from at least seven of the 27 [[EU member states]].<ref name="guardian_03062009">{{cite news|last=Traynor|first=Ian|title=Anti-gay, climate change deniers: meet David Cameron's new friends|newspaper=The Guardian|date=2 June 2009|url=https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jun/02/david-cameron-alliance-polish-nationalists|access-date=2 June 2009|location=London|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130906181732/http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jun/02/david-cameron-alliance-polish-nationalists|archive-date=6 September 2013|url-status=live}}</ref> In forming the caucus, the party broke with two decades of co-operation by the UK's Conservative Party with the mainstream European Christian Democrats and conservatives in the European parliament, the [[European People's Party]] (EPP). It did so on the grounds that it is dominated by European [[federalism|federalists]] and supporters of the [[Lisbon treaty]], which the Conservatives were generally highly critical of.<ref name="guardian_03062009" />