The voters don’t do gratitude, self-pitying politicians are wont to moan. For technocratic admirers of Dublin’s outgoing Fine Gael/Labour coalition, the Irish election of 2016 has proved the point. In 2011, a near-bankrupt and recently bailed-out republic turned to Enda Kenny as a new broom, and his government enjoyed a record majority. Five years on, the economy is growing at quite a pelt, an unemployment rate which had been at 15% is back down in single figures, and after years of retrenchment the government has – finally – got its own debt back down below 100% of GDP. Europe’s economic authorities, who have had precious few austerity success stories to point to, have clung on to Ireland as a case that shows the medicine can work.
But by routing Mr Kenny with unexpected ferocity, the voters have revealed that they do not see things this way at all – and don’t assume that they are wrong. For several years into the technical recovery, living standards continued to slide. While protesters against stiff new water charges were briefly locked up, the bankers who led Ireland into the mire still walk free. Wages remain insecure, and public services – which were always patchier in Ireland than the UK – have become less adequate. The bill for the crisis was passed to citizens who had nothing to do with its cause, and now the people are justly seething.
Many of the same things might have been said in the context of the British general election last year, and Fine Gael took such heart from David Cameron’s shock win after five years of cuts that they hired some of his advisers. But in the event, things played out very differently. There was, it is true, one close parallel, between the fate of the smaller coalition partner this weekend and that of the Liberal Democrats in 2015. Both could claim to have contributed worthwhile social reforms around the edges – indeed, most notably the very same social reform: gay marriage. But, like the Irish Greens before them, who were virtually extinguished for their part in the last coalition, Ireland’s Labour party has demonstrated afresh that parties which pose as the progressive wing of an administration defined by austerity emerge looking pointless, not principled.
But whereas the Tories could oversee a five-year squeeze on public expenditure and come out with a slightly higher vote share than before, Fine Gael has seen the whole of its historic advance in 2011 reversed in one swoop. Its historic rival Fianna Fáil, traditionally the dominant party of the republic, was not merely in charge when the crash happened, but up to its neck in the banking and property scandals which aggravated the slump. So extreme was its collapse to a poor third place in 2011 that some asked whether it could ever recover. But drawing on deep loyalties that trace back to the civil war, and strong connections in rural communities, it has shown itself to be more robust, and has now recovered to run its old enemy to within a percentage point of the first-preference vote. The Fianna Fáil identity may be all about history, but – as a folksy party of the pragmatic right – it has none of the ideological baggage that weighs Labour down in the UK. Leader Micheál Martin took note of exhaustion with service cuts, and deftly tacked slightly left in response to Mr Kenny’s promise of tax cuts.
If Fianna Fáil’s refusal to die is one part of the story, another is the continuing fragmentation of the old party system. The combined first-preference vote of the two great civil war factions has fallen below 50% for the first time, with the other half of all votes splintering between Sinn Féin, which emerges stronger, a shrivelled Labour party, independents, radical leftists and other groupings. Unlike in Britain, where the slump was not as severe, and much more like in Spain and Portugal, similarly stricken peripheries of the eurozone, the latest election has not necessarily settled who governs. A rerun may be required. Irish voters have revealed what they are against, not what they are for. And Ireland’s rulers have learned that if you preside over enough suffering for long enough, the people will make you suffer in turn.
