Sinn Féin’s shock victory
We’ve grown used to the sight of populist insurgent parties “embarrassing the establishment”, said Ross Clark in The Sun.
Even so, Sinn Féin’s victory in last weekend’s general election in Ireland came as a huge surprise. Irish voters had for decades given a wide berth to a party that unashamedly presented itself as the political wing of the Provisional IRA, even as the Provos carried out their “murderous sprees” in Northern Ireland and mainland Britain. Yet on Saturday, exceeding all predictions,
Sinn Féin gave a bloody nose to the two centrist parties that have shared power in Dublin since 1921 by winning the largest share of the vote (24.5%). Fianna Fáil received 22.2%; Leo
Varadkar’s Fine Gael, in government since 2011, trailed in third place with a mere 20.9%. Under Ireland’s complex PR system, this has left Sinn Féin with just 37 seats – ahead of Fine
Gael on 35, but behind Fianna Fáil on 38 – and it may take weeks before the new parliament’s final composition is determined. However, the outcome could well be – for the first time in the Republic’s history – that Sinn Féin will form part of its government.
Sinn Féin’s success was largely due to the way it distanced itself from its paramilitary past after the 2008 financial crisis, reinventing itself as a party of the mainstream left, said Siobhán Fenton in The Guardian. The most telling example of that strategy was the change of leadership two years ago. The party dropped 71-year-old Gerry Adams, a key figure in the Troubles with a Belfast accent – the very epitome of the older generation – and replaced him with Mary Lou McDonald, a 50-year-old Dublin-born mother of two, who studied English at Trinity College Dublin. As it turned out, neither Brexit (which Sinn Féin vociferously opposes) nor Irish unity (which it strongly supports) were big campaign issues, said the FT. Instead, it was the housing crisis and other issues affecting younger people – issues on which Sinn Féin had made the running against the two establishment parties – which preoccupied the electorate. It was no coincidence that 32% of 18- to 24-year-olds (who have little or no memory of the violence) voted for McDonald’s party, but just 12% of over-65s.
Her party may have given itself a facelift, said Eoghan Harris in The Irish Independent, but let us not blind ourselves to the fact that this was a shocking outcome. “Sinn Féin is the only European party with an armed wing – marking us out as a rogue democracy.” Far from showing contrition, it still celebrates its “squalid terrorist past”. And if it does get into government, said Owen Polley on CapX, it will surely take a hard line on Brexit negotiations, and agitate for a referendum on a united Ireland. With Sinn Féin likely to share power on both sides of the border, Ireland must brace itself for a “different and searching national conversation”, said Jenny McCartney on UnHerd. For once the election fuss dies down, the questions for Sinn Féin from the grieving relatives of the more than 1,700 people killed by the IRA will resurface. “Memory has a way of knocking to be let back in.”