Ireland’s election saw little enthusiasm for the ruling parties — but also a weakened score for opposition force Sinn Féin. Its message on housing hardened its youth support, but it was unable to build out its base across Irish society.
Most recent elections around the West have seen voters punish incumbents for rising inflation and the end of pandemic-era support programs. Ireland’s election last Friday was thus something of a relief for ruling parties Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Their popular vote (21.9 percent and 20.8, respectively) wasn’t great: indeed, a new historic low, on the poorest turnout in over a century. Added together, these two parties had over 70 percent of the vote share before the financial crisis, but soon suffered a collapse similar to that of once-mass parties in France, Italy, and beyond. Yet on Friday, the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael vote ticked down just marginally compared to the last contest in 2020. The real losers were elsewhere: the junior party in the ruling coalition, the Greens (losing eleven of twelve seats, collapsing from 7.1 to 3 percent), and, most importantly, opposition party Sinn Féin (falling from 24.5 to 19 percent).
The Greens’ failure was unsurprising. It echoed their previous anemic period in government from 2007 to 2011, when — having enforced brutal austerity alongside Fianna Fáil — they ended up losing all their seats. There was a difference this time: while this “progressive” party’s base was again disillusioned by its non-impact on a center-right government, the generally older, middle-class supporters of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael turned out more satisfied. In coalition since 2020, the two parties had a “job share,” swapping the role of taoiseach (head of government). In preelection TV debates, their respective leaders, Micheál Martin and Simon Harris, often appeared not as rivals but as a grey double act, issuing doom-laden warnings that Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald’s promises of mass investment in housebuilding were utopian folly.
If substantially similar in their impulses — a mix of Christian democracy, deference to tax-dodging corporate giants, and, increasingly, chipping away at the Irish state’s pretense of military neutrality — Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were through the twentieth century staunchly opposed, partly as a legacy of the Civil War of the 1920s. But, enfeebled ever since the 2008 crisis, they have huddled together for warmth, especially faced with Sinn Féin’s rise. It now seems most likely that they will again join in coalition, perhaps with Social Democrats, Labour, or so-called “independents” (often local business chiefs claiming a “common sense” mantle for a habitually low-tax, high-subsidy, anti-green agenda).
One year ago, this result seemed unlikely. After Sinn Féin’s breakthrough in 2020, in which its support increased by 10 percent, it hoped to form a government, perhaps heading a broad-left coalition. The fact that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael finally joined together in government seemed to strengthen its opposition to both. It polled around one-third of the vote throughout the period from early 2021 until late 2023. A focus on the dramatic rise in housing costs (up almost 100 percent in a decade) seemed to make Sinn Féin uniquely well-placed to turn out younger, lower-income and less educationally qualified voters who often haven’t voted in past elections. In Friday’s vote, its leader, McDonald, was the most popular taoiseach candidate among under-thirty-fives. Yet the rise of immigration as a focus of Irish politics appears to have stalled its rise.
Given its loss of forward momentum in recent months, Friday’s exit poll — with Sinn Féin losing votes but marginally in first place ahead of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil — brought relief among its supporters. The real results were a little worse: it was edged into third place in the vote share, dragged down by poor turnout, though its bloc of TDs (MPs) actually grew slightly. Fine Gael leader Harris, who became taoiseach in April, had called this snap election hoping to capitalize on Sinn Féin’s weakness after its poor scores in June’s European elections — and this didn’t work. Robotic campaign appearances in which Harris proved comically unable to pretend to listen to ordinary people saw Fine Gael lose its initially commanding lead and become overshadowed by Fianna Fáil.
Immigration
While the mishandling of recent sexual abuse cases was a black mark on Sinn Féin’s image, over the last year the immigration question has been more decisive in poisoning the Irish political climate and undermining this party’s message of overhaul. As Dan Finn has explained, the rising focus on this issue, rather than Sinn Féin’s promises for housing policy and the like, is not just an organic popular reaction to the reality of immigration. It owes its political importance to the way it has been treated by the center-right parties — promising more “firmness” on immigration — and the Irish as well as international media space.
Recent protests against the placement of refugees in small towns — often in hotels — have been a launchpad for anti-immigration activists claiming to speak up for “concerned citizens,” troubled by the misuse of resources. Such groups’ message was amplified internationally last November after the stabbing of a woman and three children by an Algerian immigrant (but naturalized Irish citizen) in central Dublin. The riots in response were among the worst in the city in recent decades. There was far-right social media to cheer them on. Yet even mainstream pundits suggested that, while rioters were wrong to burn buses and loot shops, migration had become an unspoken national crisis.
Sinn Féin has not sought to capitalize on anti-migration sentiment, even insofar as this affects some part of its potential base. Yet, its posture has meandered between strategic silence and attempts to cover the issue with sometimes mixed messages. It has, in general, taken a stance expressing sympathy for refugees (falling back on defending persecuted victims “in need of protection”) but has also been critical of the government’s “chaotic” handling of migrant arrivals — while also insisting those with no right to be in Ireland should be deported.
This combination of positions, if similar to other center-left parties internationally, did not really offer political leadership. Rather than use its political capital to be bold — confronting head-on the idea that immigration is sapping the housing supply and services or undermining the social fabric — its middle-position ended up pleasing few.
Immigration is not voters’ key concern and was not the core of this rather flat election campaign. Ireland’s far right has not yet shown up as a major electoral force, despite some sporadic breakthroughs. In the 2018 presidential election, a generally low-stakes contest, “independent” businessman Peter Casey pushed hard on anti-traveler and anti-immigrant bigotry, winning almost one-quarter of the vote.
Perhaps a more sustainable challenge is Independent Ireland, a new party that has tried to create a respectable, parliamentary force to the right of Fine Gael. Its EU election success in June (over 6 percent support) had relied heavily on well-known personalities, and on Friday it took just 3.6 percent. The kind of online extreme right that imports a US discourse of white supremacy and “great replacement” theory has drawn attention in analog media but has had little electoral impact so far.
But what of Sinn Féin’s wider mission? McDonald had in recent months talked about achieving Irish reunification within this decade. She spoke, as Sinn Féin long has, of an “Ireland of equals” in which the fusion with the North — and its currently much more expensive welfare state — would force a change of priorities also in the twenty-six counties. Could this Ireland have universal free health care, or the state playing a more activist role in redistributing wealth? This is a transformative agenda but would also need an emphatic majority behind it, and in this election, Sinn Féin’s campaign seemed more a defensive effort to hold together its existing base than the culmination of a fundamental swing in the Irish political balance. Its focus on housing likely contributed to its continued rising vote share among twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds. Yet it leaked far more support among fifty- to sixty-four-year-olds, a larger group.
Sinn Féin’s result was not all bad. Some other broadly left-wing parties, notably the Social Democrats, also popular among younger voters, boosted their support. On the radical left, People Before Profit, who mooted going into government with Sinn Féin, slightly increased its vote but lost seats due to the arcana of the Irish electoral system.
But the real story of this election is the hardening of the center-right bloc, hegemonic even with its historically much-reduced vote. It is still able to win enough seats, on low enough turnout, to continue flying the flag for the world of chambers of commerce, landlords, and big farmers who have so long dictated the pace of Irish politics, added to a more recent cast of tech giants. Today playing with anti-immigration rhetoric, they still hope that young Irish people doubting their prospects at home will continue to find a better future in emigration, rather than change Ireland itself.