In the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, the major opposition party and specifically its shadow cabinet is called ''
His (or Her) Majesty's Loyal Opposition. The adjective loyal'' is used because, while the role of the opposition is to oppose
His Majesty's Government, it does not dispute the
sovereign's right to the throne and therefore the legitimacy of the government. However, in other countries that use the Westminster system, the opposition is known simply as
the parliamentary opposition. In most
Westminster systems, the
leader of the opposition heads the shadow cabinet in person and directly shadows the prime minister, and the title of "shadow prime minister" is generally not used. Non-Westminster systems that have adopted a shadow cabinet system, however, typically designate its head as "shadow prime minister". Moreover, in these systems, the shadow prime minister is not necessarily the leader of the opposition party (for example, in Czechia,
ANO 2011 party leader
Andrej Babiš designated
Karel Havlíček as the party's shadow prime minister In other parliamentary parties, the membership and composition of the shadow cabinet is generally determined solely by the shadow prime minister. A related term is the
shadow budget, which is often prepared by shadow cabinets (and, when released, usually presented by the shadow finance minister or equivalent) as an alternative to the real budget presented by the government. When prepared and released in an election year, an opposition party's shadow budget will typically form a key part of the party's
manifesto, and will be largely if not wholly implemented if the opposition party subsequently forms a government (especially if it wins an outright majority).
Third parties In many jurisdictions that have the Westminster system's typical dynamics of two large parties alternating in power,
third parties (who are neither participants in the government nor in the official opposition) may also form their own parliamentary
front benches of spokespersons. However, parliamentary standing orders on the right of parties to speak often dictate that it can only be granted to a party or group if a minimum number of members can be recorded by the party. In Ireland, for example,
technical groups are often formed by third parties and independent
TDs in the
Dáil Éireann in order to increase the members' right to speak against larger parties which can afford the right to speak as front benches in government or opposition. In political systems where the parliamentary dynamics revolve around multiparty
coalition governments, however, while the
Yanukovych shadow government in Ukraine, which was made up of only one party, left the culture and health shadow portfolios vacant and reserved them for other opposition parties in case they would join the shadow coalition. Opposition parliamentary parties which are sufficiently small that they are about the same size as the government cabinet will often appoint all of their elected members to their shadow cabinet or equivalent, with third parties more likely compared to official opposition parties to use this sort of arrangement. If the parliamentary party is only slightly larger than the government's cabinet, its leadership potentially faces the awkward position of embarrassing a small minority of legislators by singling them out for exclusion from the shadow cabinet. On the other hand, incoming governments in the Westminster system often change the number and/or composition of ministries upon assuming office. Therefore, one solution to such an aforementioned issue when it occurs is to create nominal shadow "ministries" that correspond to currently nonexistent cabinet posts the party actually intends to create once in government. An opposition party can also employ this process in reverse by "merging" its shadow ministries to correspond to actual cabinet posts the opposition party wants to merge or otherwise eliminate.
Use outside English-speaking countries While the practice of parliamentary shadow cabinets or frontbenches is not widespread in Germany, party leaders have often formed boards of experts and advisors ("teams of experts", or
Kompetenzteam, in
CDU/CSU and
SPD parlance; alternate "top team", or
Spitzenteam, in
Bündnis '90/Die Grünen parlance). In France, although the formation of a shadow cabinet is not compulsory or common, several shadow cabinets have been formed. In Hungary, a shadow cabinet under the leadership of
Klára Dobrev was established by the strongest opposition party, the
Democratic Coalition, for the first time, in 2022. In Japan, the term "
Next Cabinet" was coined for the de facto shadow cabinet, though it has only been used by the
Democratic Party of Japan and its successors. In
Turkey, the main opposition party,
CHP, formed a shadow cabinet after the election of
Özgür Özel as its leader, in 2023. ==By country==