In the battle of the leaders, SF won
Martin and Varadkar scramble for coalition life raft – but their futures are uncertain
ASSESSING the importance of leadership for political campaigns and elections has always been a rather precarious business. A common problem for political leaders is that they can be seen as demigods within parties while leaving large swathes of the wider electorate cold. We might call this the Gerry Adams syndrome.
Another problem is they can lead disunited parties where their own leadership is constantly being sniped at from within. We can call this the Charles Haughey effect.
Some parties are of the view that changing the leader will automatically make them more attractive to the electorate. This week saw
Labour’s Brendan Howlin step down as party leader and it will be led in the 33rd Dáil by its fourth leader in six years. Labour unceremoniously dumped Eamon Gilmore after a disastrous showing in the 2014 local and European elections. Yet just three years earlier he had led the party to its greatest ever showing in an Irish general election winning 37 seats on 19.4% of the vote.
Gilmore was replaced by Joan Burton who promptly led the party to its worst ever election performance in 2016 which led to her stepping down. Things got no better under Howlin and now the party is on the lookout for another saviour.
Despite some internal mutterings over the leadership of Mary Lou McDonald after its own disastrous local and European election results of last June, Sinn Féin didn’t panic and seek the quick fix of a change of leader.
Instead the party reworked its message, rallied around McDonald and was rewarded with last weekend’s sensational results.
Sinn Féin’s extraordinary gains across the State, with a slew of candidates being elected with huge votes who were barely known within their own constituencies, spoke to a campaign where leadership and party brand mattered more than any other in the history of the State.
McDonald’s leadership was vital to Sinn Féin’s breakthrough last weekend. There was simply no way that something similar could have happened under Gerry Adams. He was too toxic a figure to bring any real political success to Sinn Féin in the Republic.
This was magnified by the fact that he could not campaign properly in either the 2011 or 2016 general elections due to his lack of economic nous.
He cut quite the anachronistic figure when Sinn Féin’s 37 TDs met on Thursday; a figure from a bygone age with nothing to offer for the future, unlike the party’s supremely self-confident leader.
The anachronism metaphor can also be applied to Micheál Martin. In an election where change was the dominant motif of the campaign he struggled to portray himself as the agent of that change.
His message that if people wanted a change of government then only Fianna Fáil could provide such an alternative never gained any real traction due to the party’s support for Fine Gael during the confidence and supply arrangement. It has also been a struggle for the nine years of his leadership that he keeps having to apologise for his party’s role in the economic crash.
Martin has bundles of courage and will need all his skill and nous over the coming weeks when it comes to government formation. But the facts speak for themselves. He has just led Fianna Fáil to the second worst election result in its history. Losing seats and vote share was not on the agenda for a party which expected to have at least 20 seats more than any of its rivals.
Fianna Fáil is in the throes of an existential crisis as it ponders its election result and what to do about any potential coalition with Sinn
Féin or Fine Gael, both extremely unpalatable choices to any selfrespecting Soldier of Destiny.
Despite Martin’s dire warning about the possibility of another election, this can hardly be something he could actually approach with any confidence given Fianna Fáil’s chastening performance on the campaign trail and its ultimate result.
Fianna Fáil is not exactly brim
‘Things got no better for Labour under Howlin’
‘FF is not brimming with talent to replace Martin’
ming with talent to replace Martin but the dominant lesson from last weekend’s result is that the party is unlikely to forge ahead of its rivals with him at the helm.
In that context he must be surely desperate to cut some sort of coalition deal to make himself Taoiseach over the coming weeks.
Leadership was also crucial to Fine Gael’s disastrous election campaign and result. Leo Varadkar’s Fine Gael parliamentary party colleagues chose him in mid-2017 to lead the party on the grounds that his face on the posters would not only save their seats but bring in many others with them.
Varadkar made a very serious miscalculation by not calling the election on his terms by October 2018 at the latest. It was a spectacular failure of political leadership, the dire consequences of which have come home to roost.
Over a year into his leadership with Fine Gael at 33% in the polls, a late autumn election in 2018 would have been the ideal time to go the country. Instead by not calling an election then, Varadkar left himself open to events.
The motion of no confidence in the health minister Simon Harris forced him into calling the election in the bleak of winter and the Fine Gael campaign, with its mantra of don’t switch sides over Brexit, never gained traction.
The idea that Ireland could not have an election due to Brexit was in fact the great fallacy of Irish politics over the last number of years. Brexit didn’t stop the British having two elections before we finally went to the polls. Varadkar’s anaemic performance on the campaign trail ultimately saw Fine Gael get its worst vote for over 70 years and he must take the blame for it.
However, he could still find himself at the heart of the next government if Micheál Martin comes calling with the Greens in tow.
Nevertheless, Fine Gael is now the third party of the State it played such a central part in founding and needs to rebuild.
Its parliamentary party, while denuded, still contains some significant talent.
However, it needs to decide what it stands for and to do a better job of selling that to the electorate. That would be done better from opposition. But if government comes calling, then Fine Gael will have to answer it.
The question of Varadkar’s leadership, however, remains a live one. It is not impossible, for instance, to imagine a situation where he becomes Minister for Foreign Affairs but steps down as party leader if that is what is needed to form a coalition.
In any event the General Election of 2020 has given us the most extraordinary result in the State’s history and that result was based on a campaign where leadership mattered more than in any other election. In that context it has also given the leaders of the three main parties much to ponder in the weeks ahead.