NI election results 2022: Who is Alliance leader Naomi Long?

Naomi Long has been a councillor, lord mayor, MP, MEP and an MLA

Naomi Long is now the leader of the third largest party at Stormont.

She has led Alliance to repeated election successes in recent years but the 2022 assembly election will go down in history.

The centre-ground party has taken 17 seats, more than doubling its previous number in 2017.

Long, who served as the justice minister in the last assembly, is a popular character across the benches.

She's a well-known face in Northern Ireland, a straight-talker and a consummate performer in front of the media.

However for many, she will forever be the woman who knocked former first minister Peter Robinson out of the Westminster seat he had held for more than 30 years.

'Men in grey suits'

Born in 1971, Long grew up in the heart of her Belfast East constituency.

Politics was not part of the plan and she earned a Masters degree in engineering at Queen's University, Belfast.

Naomi Long with former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at re-opening of Belfast City Hall in 2009

But her experiences there changed her mind.

"What I saw in the 70s and 80s was the failure of politics," she said.

"I suppose all I saw were men in grey suits shouting at each other on the television. It just didn't seem to hold any real hope.

"When I went to Queen's (university) I started mixing with people in an integrated environment and I realised very quickly how much people have in common."

She first took political office in 2001 when she was elected to Belfast City Council.

Naomi Long received death threats during loyalist protests

Her rise was relatively meteoric - she became an assembly member in the 2003 election and within three years became deputy leader of the party.

Despite her higher profile, she maintained her interest in local government and became only the second female Lord Mayor of Belfast in 2009.

The Alliance party was targeted by loyalists in 2014, angered by their support for a decision to display the union flag at Belfast City Hall on designated days, rather than every day of the year.

Long received death threats and later revealed she had been secretly battling skin cancer at the time of the unrest.

After losing her Westminster seat in May 2015, she told the BBC she had considered leaving politics but decided to fight the next assembly election.

She has also represented Northern Ireland at the European Parliament but she returned as an assembly member after Brexit.

Mrs Long is married to her childhood sweetheart Michael Long

In October 2016 Long took over from long-standing Alliance leader David Ford.

Accepting the role, Long said: "Leadership is not just a position, it is an attitude.

"I want to re-energise our membership but also re-energise a public who are jaded with politics and what passes for politics at Stormont."

She is married to Michael Long, an Alliance councillor on Belfast City Council and her childhood sweetheart.

In 2017, Long revealed she had been suffering from endometriosis for most of her adult life and would undergo surgery for the condition.

Ahead of the 2022 election, she predicted that a big result for her party could herald the end of a political system based on the binary division of nationalism and unionism, green and orange.

Mrs Long wants a devolved government formed by willing partners rather than a mandatory coalition, and while the party's continued rise is unlikely to prompt sweeping changes in the short term, it will heap further pressure on Stormont's creaking foundations.

In her acceptance speech, she said more voters were moving away from traditional politics.

"They actually want to see government that works for them," she said.

"Instead of being divided, fragile, constantly falling over, held to ransom by one party or another, they want to see continuity of government and focus on delivery."