Ireland election: Sinn Fein surges to top poll
Sinn Féin have stormed their way to the largest number of votes in Ireland’s general election. In the poll held on Saturday, the nationalist party ended up gaining 24.5% of the popular vote, ahead of the historic two main parties Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael on 22.2% and 20.9% respectively. The result was hailed yesterday by Sinn Féin’s leader, Mary Lou McDonald, as “a big statement of change” and “something of a revolution at the ballot box.”
Sinn Féin have gathered momentum across the country, with several candidates winning huge victories. Ireland’s voting is based upon a model of proportional representation called Single Transferrable Vote (STV), where candidates are ranked in order of preference. The vote counts have revealed the extent of Sinn Féin’s triumph, as they soared to the top of the first preference votes throughout the Republic of Ireland’s 26 counties.
Irish politics has traditionally been dominated by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, two parties on the centre-right which expound variations upon patriotic, liberal and conservative themes. One or the other party has led every Irish government since the creation of the Irish Free State in December 1922.
Now all that is set to change – the Irish Times declared yesterday that “Spectacular Sinn Féin victory reshapes Ireland’s political landscape”. The incumbent Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, said that Ireland’s two-party system has now become “a three party system”, one which “is going to make forming a government quite difficult.”
The paradigms of politics have shifted. A new force is in town, and the party once toxified by several troubled chapters in Ireland’s history looks set to bring about a major realignment in Irish politics for the first time since the Civil War of the 1920s.
Sinn Féin has a controversial past – the party was the political wing of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), the nationalist paramilitary who are estimated to have killed a total of 1,800 people between 1969 and 1994, including 600 civilians. For many Irish voters, Sinn Féin remain tainted by their past links with the IRA and their association with the violence of “The Troubles”.
Yet the ghosts of the past have not haunted many voters who are unable to remember the conflict. The youth vote surged for Sinn Fein: the data from the Ipsos MRBI exit poll, conducted for The Irish Times, RTÉ, TG4 and UCD, showed that support for the party among those aged 18-24 and 25-34 jumped to 31.8% and 32% respectively.
Maura Adshead of the University of Limerick said that Sinn Fein’s reputation is less toxic among voters with little or no experience of The Troubles. And Claire McGing of Maynooth University said that “This could be called the youthquake election.”
Sinn Féin also did very well among citizens who are recent migrants and from non-Irish ethnic groups, especially in urban Dublin. In Balbriggan, in the Dublin Fingal constituency, for instance, some 31% of the population are from non-Irish backgrounds. Here, in Dublin Fingal, Sinn Féin’s Louise O’Reilly sailed to victory in the first round with 24% of the vote in a constituency where her party won just 8.6% last time round. A perfect microcosm of the national surge.
The key to Sinn Féin’s success is their new programme. They championed a redistributive left-wing platform, promising to rebalance and reshape the economy in favour of the urban poor and Irish workers. Their offer was a combination of a brand of Corbynomics with national identitarianism – complete with rent freezes, more tax credits, and a pledge to build 100,000 houses a year all topped off with a wealth tax on “the rich”.
It was a combination which attracted new supporters while also retaining the vote of the traditional, nationalist base. Alongside spectacular gains in urban Dublin, Sinn Féin also consolidated among classic supporters near the northern border. They won more votes than any other party here, including a resounding 45% in Donegal.
Their political challenge now will be holding together a kind of nativist and non-nativist coalition, one encompassing traditional nationalists, white Irish workers, recent migrants and urban progressives. It will necessitate the type of balancing act that has proven so difficult for parties of the left across Europe. The Dublin-Donnegal alliance may yet unravel in the longer term.
Indeed, the very key to their success raises questions about whether the party will be able to successfully push for a referendum on Irish unification, an ambition of Sinn Féin’s since the earliest days of the Free State. McDonald has said that she now expects a referendum on Irish unity to take place “in the next five years or so”. Yet the scale of her mandate was not won upon the promise of Irish unity but a domestic agenda south of the border.
Ultimately, Sinn Féin’s popular domestic platform served to undercut both the Irish Labour Party and the governing Fine Gael, who both haemorrhaged votes and seats. Varadkar had tried to make this Ireland’s Brexit election, seeking to turn what he saw as a popular diplomatic success to his advantage at the ballot box. But the Irish voters remained resolutely focused on crises in health, housing and homelessness. The exit poll showed that Brexit was an important issue for just 1% of those who cast their vote.
Simply because Sinn Féin topped the vote, however, this does not mean that they will hold the largest number of seats in the Irish parliament, the Dáil Éireann. Because they only fielded 42 candidates, they disqualified themselves from converting their large vote share into the 80 seats needed for a majority. Instead, projections show Fianna Fáil as the largest party, on 45 seats to Sinn Fein’s 37 and Fine Gael’s 36.
And for all the talk of a “youthquake”, David Farrell, professor of Politics at University College Dublin, pointed out that significant support for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil remained among those aged 65 and above. He said “It’s not so much a youthquake” as “the last gasp of the pensioners…holding the old party system together.” The two parties still accounted for a combined 43.1% of the votes cast on Saturday.
They may find it tricky, perhaps impossible, to supplant the incumbent two parties by force of parliamentary arithmetic. Varadkar has already said that he will not work with Sinn Féin in a coalition, saying that “A forced marriage would not result in a good government.”
McDonald’s best bet could lie in persuading Fianna Fáil’s leader to enter into coalition with them, and Michaél Martin (who leads the party) has not ruled out talking with Sinn Féin.
Yet there are signs that McDonald, having successfully shed the taint of her party’s past, has no intention of becoming bloodied by entering an unpopular coalition government. She has said that “I want us to have a government for the people. I want to have ideally a government with no Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael in it.”
In other words, McDonald may be taking her party’s name to its logical conclusion – in Gaelic, “Sinn Féin” means “ourselves alone”. It may be in her party’s better interests to allow Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil to struggle to keep an unpopular minority government afloat and patiently await a fresh election. And next time, Sinn Féin will surely field candidates across all constituencies.
The political landscape has changed, voter volatility is high, and the established two-party order has been shaken. Time will tell whether or not Sinn Féin will convert their surge into political power; and whether the party so often tainted by the tragedies of Ireland’s past will have an opportunity to shape the country’s future.