It looks like the Left must wait despite result of referendum

Smaller parties seem more interested in ‘saving’ people like evangelical Christians than actually winning their votes, writes Eoin O’Malley

WITHOUT so much as pausing for breath, many on the left excitedly asked: ‘‘What next?’’ After taking down the Eighth Amendment, they can use people power to reform the health service and solve the housing crisis. There will be a complete separation of Church and State. The possibilities seem limitless.

They can point to the huge increases in turnout among the young, especially young women, as evidence that people can be mobilised on issues, and presumably they can also be mobilised to vote for leftwing parties.

Has the left’s moment arrived?

In a country that has never had a left-leaning government then surely the time has come for the left to grow. Across Europe, people appear to be looking for change. Issues of inequality, precarious work conditions, and a rental crisis are spoken of enough that an alternative party could produce a plausible narrative for change. The conditions in 2016 seemed ideal, but there was no left-wing party that people were willing to co-ordinate around.

This is a perennial problem for the left. There are many lefts: a pragmatic left, a cultural left, and a socialist left. They are either dull, divorced from their base, or have been dismissed by history.

In the aftermath of the abortion referendum, Ireland is littered with small left-wing parties. In the exit poll that RTE commissioned with the support of DCU, UCD and UCC we get a lot of useful information about what voters feel about lots of issues, not just abortion.

Without even drilling down into this rich source of data on Irish society, we can just take party voting intentions. Unlike in regular opinion polls, these are real voters, and so might give a better idea of actual party support. Unlike in normal elections, however, some people might be motivated to vote on this issue who don’t normally vote and others who normally vote might have stayed at home.

In the data we see that turnout among women went up on that of the election in 2016, but it went down for men. Turnout was hugely up among the young, and slightly down for the old. This sample should have been a group that is left leaning.

A large proportion (27pc) of this group of voters had no clear opinion on party choice. This was much higher among the younger voters, suggesting there are politically interested voters ripe for capture.

When we exclude those undecided, the party support is: Fine Gael 36pc, Fianna Fail 23pc, Sinn Fein 16pc, Labour 5pc, Greens 3pc, Social Democrats 1pc, Solidarity/PBP 1pc. The rest went to Independents and other small parties.

The first thing that should strike us is that Fine Gael is now at the level of support it enjoyed in the 2011 election. It must be tempting for Varadkar to see if he can convert that opinion poll support into actual seats. He’ll proceed with caution because poll leads can be soft.

Another thing to note is that Sinn Fein isn’t doing that much better than it did in 2016. That is despite having a new leader, Mary Lou McDonald, and that she was prominent in the campaign, both in debates and on Sinn Fein’s posters.

When we combine support for the small left-wing parties that Sinn Fein might hope to rely on to form an alternative government, they just break 10pc. They’ll probably do better in terms of seats because many of the people in these parties are well-known TDs who get better support than their party label would give them. Still, the chances of a left-led government still appear distant.

This is especially puzzling when we look at data on specific policies. People say they prefer more spending to tax cuts, for instance. Irish people appear to espouse ideas that are left-leaning. So why are so few willing to embrace leftist parties?

It could be to do with the nature of the left. One of the issues for some of the parties on the left is that they engage in performative politics. Some of the posters in the referendum reveal this.

We know that a referendum wins if it can get the middle voter to support it, but the small parties had messaging that was more likely to repel them. It didn’t matter, but it shows they don’t want people’s votes, they’re more like evangelical Christians; they want to ‘‘save’’ people.

They embrace protest politics at the expense of parliamentary politics, ignoring that it is in parliament and government that things happen. While they might argue that their job is to raise issues and consciousness, they shouldn’t complain when decision-makers ignore them.

The more serious problem is that the left doesn’t appear to have ideas that appeal to large swathes of voters. Much of what they campaign on is a reaction to government policy. For any perceived injustice they want the State to step in. For the very small radical left parties, which garner a disproportionate amount of media coverage, they haven’t moved beyond a world in which everything will be magically free.

They’ve recast the Marxist dictum: “From others according to their ability, to us according to our desires.”

But most people believe that people should work for their living, and only in special circumstance, the very young, the old and the infirm, should be spared the need to work.

The Irish left’s approach might work if people think the world is unfair, but Irish people generally think the country is fair. Recent survey data from Eurobarometer shows that Ireland, Denmark and Sweden come top in considering their country fair. Four out of five Irish people think that life is fair and that they have opportunities to get ahead. This compares with just a quarter of Greeks.

The dizzy excitement on the left about people flocking to it could come to pass, but all experience suggests they’ll be left wondering about what could have been.

‘The left doesn’t have ideas that appeal to large swathes of voters’