FG fear FF will call election after Budget 2018

SENIOR Fine Gael ministers fear Budget 2018 will be scuppered by an ‘increasingly desperate Fianna Fáil who are starting to believe Budget 2018 will be their last chance to provoke an election on their terms before 2020’.

There’s growing speculation Fianna Fáil will pull the plug on the minority government after the budget is revealed in October. A Fine Gael strategist explained: ‘Once Budget 2018 is gone, the window for an election is very thin. The spring and early summer of 2018 will be dominated by repeal the eighth [referendum]. ‘The autumn, whether we like it or not, will be all about the presidential election.

‘Then 2019 is out too, there are MEP and council elections.’

Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan told the Mail on Sunday: ‘[Fianna Fáil] see the budget as a final fault-line, a political last chance saloon.’ He said: ‘If Fianna Fáil does pull the plug we will campaign on a ticket of sound economics and challenge the politics of populism.’

A senior Fianna Fáil strategist said: ‘Budget 2018 gives us our last good chance to go to the country on our own terms.’

Meanwhile, Fianna Fáil TD John McGuinness yesterday said since Enda Kenny’s departure ‘the only thing that has changed is that we have a young jogging member of the twitterati as Taoiseach’.

The Government, he said ‘think they are fooling the people with a jog here and a tweet there but politics will have to wake up or people will furnish us with outcomes out of the norm’.