Theresa Reidy: Irish elections are set to become even more volatile and unpredictable
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Volatile, uncertain, unpredictable — these are the words that now describe voting at Irish elections.
The headline outcome of the local elections was the collapse in the Sinn Féin vote.
After receiving 24.5% of the votes at the 2020 general election, Sinn Féin support climbed in opinion polls and hovered in the mid 30s until late 2023, when it began to slip slowly.
Election campaign polls suggested Sinn Féin support would probably be somewhere around 20-22%. In the end, it was nearly half that.
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The Fine Gael recovery in the polls has been called the ‘Harris Hop’, it tracks back to the party leadership change-over and materialised in the election results.
Fianna Fáil also performed well, it is noticeably ahead of all recent polling and although the party will lose some seats, its performance provides it with vital momentum ahead of the upcoming general election.
Support for the Greens is down but again the party has saved many of its council seats. The outlook remains fairly stable for most of the small parties of Labour, the Social Democrats and Solidarity-People Before Profit. It is the Independents that have soared and they look set to secure a large number of additional council seats.
Pollsters always advise that in polling, it is the trend that matters, and not any individual poll result. And to an extent, the polls were showing clear indications of the patterns which emerged at the local elections, except for Fianna Fáil and this must be given serious attention, especially with a general election imminent.
Two important and inter-related dynamics are essential to understanding why Irish elections have become so unpredictable.
First, voter loyalties to political parties, which we call partisanship, have weakened across the democratic world since the 1970s, including in Ireland.
Long-standing affiliations that were often rooted in social class are not as important as they once were. The Civil War laid the foundations for Irish party political competition but this divide had lost most of its relevance by the 1970s, and with this began a slow decay of voter loyalty to the big two parties of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.
It took decades for it to materialise fully but it is a long time since elections could be understood through the preferences of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael families and their occasional deviations.
As the 20th century closed out, a series of new, small political parties began to capture the imagination of the voting public.
First the Progressive Democrats and later, the Green Party, Social Democrats, Solidarity-People Before Profit and Aontú moved into the political picture and began to absorb some of the previously loyal Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael voters and many of the younger generation voting for the first time. Sinn Féin was also part of this change.
The transformation was completed in 2011 when the economic crisis upended the remnants of the old party system. Fianna Fáil lost its powerful connection with its voters. Fine Gael and Labour initially benefited but were routed in 2016 and 2020.
Sinn Féin was the most effective party in opposition during this period and built its electoral base carefully through the general elections of 2011, 2016, and 2020. Its weak performance at the 2019 local elections was discounted as a possible blip.
The big question which arose was whether or not Sinn Féin had managed to confound the trend of falling partisanship and forge new and enduring connections with voters, like those enjoyed by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in the past.
The 2024 local elections tell us that this is most likely not the case. Sinn Féin benefitted from the declining fortunes of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael but the support it secured was not resilient, it was quite transient and dissipated in the face of political attacks from all sides, mis-steps on some important issues, and a weak campaign.
Now that voters are much less likely to inherit their voting preferences, campaigns have moved centre stage in shaping decision making and this is the second important component of election volatility.
More than half of all voters reported that they made up their mind who they would vote for during the campaign at elections in the last decade. Many voters are also changing who they vote for from one election to the next, leading to sharp swings in the performance of many of the parties.
Campaigns are crucial at motivating voters to turn out at the polls and a majority of voters did not participate on June 7.
The sharp decline in the Sinn Féin vote is undoubtedly shaped by several factors but turnout is important among them.
The Sinn Féin campaign was not effective, it did not mobilise many of its more likely voters, younger people and those in economically disadvantaged communities.
Posters of party leader Mary Lou McDonald appeared late in the campaign, too late it turned out, and her radio performances in the last week were mixed.
This contrasts with some very favourable coverage of Simon Harris in the weeks since he became Fine Gael leader and Taoiseach, and of Tánaiste Micheal Martin, especially his handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Finally, the combined effect of declining partisanship and more important election campaigns mean that all of the parties are struggling with their election strategies.
In 2020, Sinn Féin had too few candidates and arguably Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil had too many. In 2024, Sinn Féin had too many candidates. It is easy to isolate this point after an election but fundamentally it is very difficult to manage candidate strategy when party support levels oscillate so much from election to election.
Local elections are important in setting the scene for the upcoming general election, they will provide an essential set of potential Dáil candidates in the form of new councilors but their significance should not be over-stated, they are not predictors of the next election.
If anything, the message to take away is that more volatility is the most likely outcome.
- Theresa Reidy is a political scientist at University College Cork