Good week for America shows the benefits of vote pact here
IT’S been a good week for American democracy, and for the free world. American exceptionalism is reestablishing itself after years of ignorance and a trance-like stupor induced by a delusional megalomaniac who trampled on decency and threatened the rule of law.
For the first time since June 16, 2015 when Donald Trump launched his ridiculously vainglorious but ultimately successful bid to become president of the United States, the people of America appear to have regained control of their senses.
Now American voters have refused to grant Trump a ‘red wave’ Republican success in mid-term elections, reducing him to a twotime loser against Joe Biden and probably signalling the beginning of the end of his stranglehold on the Republican party.
After years of enduring Trump’s hateful and divisive politics, at home and abroad, after turning something of a blind eye to his manifest narcissism and his infatuation with authoritarian and dictator fruitcakes like Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin, America is reawakening, alert to the clear and present danger Trump represented for their republic.
JUST when we thought that the culture wars and bitter political polarisation had so divided America that it could never be put back together again, sanity appears to be returning. And this should give other countries in the democratic world, including us, hope that scary predictions of political hazard, like Sinn Féin taking power in Ireland, need not become our reality.
With around 35% support in the latest opinion polls it’s almost certain that Sinn Féin will emerge the largest party in the Dáil after the next general election in about two years. But that doesn’t mean that Sinn Féin will, or is entitled, to lead the next government.
This week we saw the first signs of a dawning realisation in Fine Gael that all is not lost with incoming Taoiseach Leo Varadkar suggesting a voting pact with Fianna Fáil. Micheál Martin’s dismissal of such a pact speaks more to internal Fianna Fáil party tensions rather than hard-headed political strategy – and, anyway, some sort of deal on transfers will be hammered out in time.
The same opinion polls that put
Mary Lou McDonalds’s Sinn Féin at 35% has Fine Gael (22%) and Fianna Fáil (21%) with a combined 43%, enough to bring in over 70 seats.
The parties won a total of 73 seats in 2020 with precisely that percentage of the first-preference vote and the likelihood is that they’d win even more seats if a vote-transfer pact is in place.
Such vote management would provide the platform for a pivot by voters away from empty political hectoring, rhetoric and posturing, if what seems to be happening in America occurs here too.
Significantly, the recent Ipsos poll revealed that while 35% of voters want Ms McDonald as Taoiseach after the next election, 50% don’t. Surely such opinion cannot be ignored?
ALSO, there is 30% support for the current Coalition government continuing in office with only 24% favouring a Sinn Féin-led administration with either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. Trump’s time has been characterised by disruption, distortion and a disturbance of the moral compass that guides democratic politics.
We know what that sounds like here when Ms McDonald seeks to draw a distinction between the murderous activities engaged in by the Provisional IRA and regular, run-of-the-mill gangsterism and criminality. She said there was no comparison, one to the other.
Truth is, gangsterism – in the round – is much easier to manage and decidedly less lethal when compared to the kind of politically inspired, hateful, sectarian, decades-long violence perpetrated by the IRA. It is clear that Sinn Féin is still unwilling to admit that the terrible trauma inflicted on Ireland by the IRA was wrong, unwarranted and shameful at every level.
In fact, quite the contrary – it still insists that such murderous violence, and mass abuse of human rights was justified.
And now it’s on the brink of power in a country it once derided as a Free State lackey for the Brits.
Given the obvious risks we now face, Leo Varadkar’s appeal for a voting pact with Fianna Fáil should be embraced, enthusiastically, by all democrats interested in protecting the Republic.
Sinn Féin still has a long way to go to prove its suitability and competence to govern. It hasn’t spent near enough time on the naughty step – its decontamination hasn’t yet been completed.
After the last election the air was thick with whinging because of Sinn Féin’s exclusion from government. That cacophony of special pleadings without substance will occur again next time, with even more intensity if the party is the largest in the Dáil.
And next time also, the whingers should be ignored.