Three-horse race in Ireland
Dublin, Feb. 8: Ireland began voting in a general election on Saturday, with Prime Minister Leo Varadkar hoping to secure a new term on the back of Brexit but voters likely to judge him more on his domestic record.
Polls opened across the country at 07.00 GMT, although a small number of islands off the west coast voted on Friday to allow for rough seas that could disrupt the transport of ballots by boat. Some 3.3 million people are eligible to vote to elect 159 members of the Dail, the lower chamber of parliament in Dublin.
Varadkar’s Fine Gael party has been in power since 2016 but polling suggests they are trailing centre-right rivals Fianna Fail and republicans Sinn Fein. On Monday, Sinn Fein — the former political wing of the IRA paramilitary group — were out in front on 25 percent, with Fianna Fail on 23 percent and Fine Gael on 20 percent.“This election is wide open,” Varadkar said at his final campaign stop in the western town of Ennis on Friday. “It’s a three horse race, three parties, all within shouting distance of each other.” Varadkar launched his campaign after successfully helping to broker a deal cushioning Britain’s EU exit on January 31 by avoiding a hard border with British-run Northern Ireland. An open frontier was a key requirement of the 1998 peace agreement that largely ended three decades of violence over British rule in the north, which left more than 3,000 dead. Varadkar has warned voters that Brexit is “not done yet”, as London prepares for talks with Brussels to secure a longer-term trade deal in record time before the end of this year. Failure to do so could present an “existential threat” to the Irish economy, he said. But experts suggest he may have miscalculated the public mood with surveys indicating Brexit was a low concern among the electorate. Other parties have hammered Fine Gael over failings in health care, housing and homelessness.
“You want us over the next three years to focus on issues like health and housing with the same passion and intensity that we’ve focused on Brexit in the past three years,” he said.