5 December 2024

Is Sinn Féin the worst opposition party in Europe?

As incumbent governments fell across the world, Ireland’s establishment held firm.

The defining political theme of 2024 has been the curse of incumbency. Across Europe – in France, Austria, Belgium, the United Kingdom – incumbent governments suffered at the polls (in some cases, like here, they faced near wipeout). This trend has been replicated the world over: in Japan, New Zealand and the US. The recent elections on 29 November in the Republic of Ireland did not follow this direction of travel. As I wrote in these pages ahead of the election, the incumbent establishment – Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil – was destined for government once again. The grip of Ireland’s liberal centre is vice-like.

Meanwhile, Sinn Féin has been shown up. A party that positions itself as a change candidate ought to have performed rather well in 2024. But the long-accepted narrative that Sinn Féin would take power both north and south of the border has been complicated as the party’s vote share in the Republic shrunk from a quarter (in 2020) to a fifth. Mary Lou McDonald’s victory lap – once considered inevitable by the party’s optimists – will likely never come to pass.

The party is often self-congratulatory in unwarranted moments. And this tendency has been on full display in the wake of the results. McDonald declared that “two-party politics” in Ireland had not just ended but been “consigned to the dustbin of history”. She said of the voter: “you have given us again a powerful and strong mandate” (a mandate for what, exactly, remains unclear). Meanwhile, reality bites: Paschal Donohoe, the former minister for finance and intellectual heft behind the Fine Gael project, wondered whether Sinn Féin were the “weakest opposition party in Europe”.

There is a single, important mitigating circumstance for Sinn Féin’s retreat. The inflationary pressures triggered by the war in Ukraine have been a significant explanatory factor to the rise of the opposition parties across Europe. When the economy feels bad the electorate blames the status-quo government that guided the country there – fairly or not. Ireland, thanks to a long-held policy of low corporation tax that encourages American tech and pharma behemoths to operate their European headquarters there, currently has more robust economic scaffolding than the rest of the continent. The government is sitting on a budget surplus and can throw cash at cost-of-living problems. This model may be completely upended by an economically isolationist Donald Trump, but for now the electorate is thankful.

Nevertheless, Sinn Féin has not just failed to advance; it has retreated since 2020. Part of this is thanks to a slew of scandals that rocked the party: a convicted paedophile press officer who nevertheless received letters of recommendations from colleagues while still under investigation for the child sex offences; accusations that the party runs a “kangaroo court”-style selection process; a track record of “concealment and secrecy” described as “shocking” by the then tánaiste (and soon-to-be taoiseach) Micheál Martin.

The party might be able to redress its structural issues and the secrecy encoded in its DNA. But it faces a cosmic challenge. In a bid to gain mainstream respectability in a country that still understands Sinn Féin to be the political wing of the IRA, the party has engaged in some thorough reputation laundering. McDonald was hand-selected by Gerry Adams, for example, to usher the party into a new era. She is well-mannered, posh and from Dublin – a very different proposition to the grizzled, violent men traditionally associated with Sinn Féin. As the party broadened its appeal it adopted the policies of a progressive leftist party, and all of a sudden became concerned about social justice. This stance won it the support in 2020 of a coterie of cosy urban liberals.

But now, Sinn Féin’s electoral coalition is broken. On the one hand there is the republican working class, anxious about immigration, who feel betrayed by Sinn Féin’s progressive lurch; and on the other, urban liberals who want Sinn Féin to be doveish on immigration and to continue selling left-ish economic populism. The party has learned that ethno-nationalists and liberals are not easy bedfellows.

And so Sinn Féin failed to ride the anti-incumbency wave. It has fashioned itself along the same lines as the actual incumbency (Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil) by dragging its platform to the centre. The catch-22 for the party is that without cleaving to the centre it will fail to put enough distance between itself and its violent past; but by heading to the centre the party betrays core components of its base. Now Sinn Féin looks just like the establishment it claims to abhor without ever having had the chance to govern.