FF must position itself as a responsible centre party

INSIDE POLITICS: It is not impossible for Fianna Fáil to make a comeback in the face of the hostility felt by so many towards the party

THE INFLUX of so many new Fine Gael, Labour and Sinn Féin TDs and the colourful array of Independents captured the headlines when the 31st Dáil met on Wednesday, but it was equally striking to observe the tattered remnants manning the Fianna Fáil benches.

The savage depletion, in one fell swoop, of the party that dominated Irish politics for 80 years was astonishing to behold. Its future is now impossible to predict. While it would be foolish to write Fianna Fáil’s obituary at this stage, the party will have its work cut out to recover from the catastrophe.

Many in the media and Fianna Fáil have pointed to the example of Fine Gael in 2002 as a template for recovery after an electoral disaster. There are certainly important lessons to be drawn from the Fine Gael experience but there are also critical differences between the nature and scale of the defeat suffered by the two parties.

For a start, while Fine Gael did very badly in 2002, losing 20 per cent of its vote compared to the previous election, this time around Fianna Fáil lost an incredible 60 per cent of its support by comparison to 2007.

As well as the difference in scale there was also a crucial psychological difference. Fine Gael was the perennial runner-up, always trailing behind Fianna Fáil at elections – it even had occasional bouts of power through coalition. Dealing with defeat, even a bad one, was not something out of the ordinary for Fine Gael. By contrast, Fianna Fáil, the party of power, simply has no experience of dealing with a bad defeat, never mind a rout.

Most important of all, Fine Gael’s problem in 2002 was that it appeared to be irrelevant; Fianna Fáil in 2011 is a toxic brand. Recovering from public indifference is one thing but making a comeback in the face of the hostility and loathing felt by so many people towards the party will be a task of an entirely different order.

Yet it is not an impossible one. Fianna Fáil has one underestimated advantage that Fine Gael had in 2002. It has a branch network of loyalty in every constituency up and down the country and family traditions of support going back generations. New parties have come and gone over the decades but the “faded flags of the Civil War” as Mary Robinson termed them back in 1990, have shown an ability to keep flying in the teeth of violent storms.

Fianna Fáil has its history and tradition, and will not quietly depart the political stage like the Progressive Democrats or Democratic Left. However, history and tradition will keep a political party going only if it is relevant to the people’s needs in the present day. How Fianna Fáil can position itself to do that in the face of such public enmity is its real problem.

It will certainly take time and maybe even a very long time before it can rehabilitate itself.

A lot will depend on how the new Government performs over the next couple of years and whether the country begins to recover from the economic and psychological setback it has suffered after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger bubble.

How the public reacts to the austerity measures that will inevitably have to be adopted by the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition will have a huge bearing on the prospects of Fianna Fáil. The party will probably be able to say “I told you so” as the Government’s policy unfolds but that won’t get it over the fact it played such a role in the creation of the crisis.

Micheál Martin and Fianna Fáil will have to make one crucial decision on how to position themselves if the new Coalition actually has the guts to face up to the range of vested interests that still need to be confronted if the country is to be put back on its feet.

In the past Fianna Fáil in opposition always lined itself up with every interest group that had a row with the government of the day. There will be a real temptation, particularly as it will be competing with Sinn Féin and the various left-wing TDs, to revert to populist opposition rather than the constructive approached initially promised by Martin.

However, Fianna Fáil risks making itself look foolish by opposing the very same policies it started to implement in the autumn of 2008 when it belatedly woke up to the nature of the economic and financial crisis.

Of course it will be galling to see Fine Gael and Labour now adopting similar policies to those denounced in opposition but Fianna Fáil’s only hope of long-term relevance is to be consistent. Back in 2002 an internal Fine Gael report into the state of the party concluded that “the opportunity and challenge for Fine Gael is to set out to capture the progressive centre”. The report identified a commitment to financial responsibility in dealing with the public finances and pledges to reform the public service and the health system as crucial to the party’s long- term prospects.

That same report charted the likely electoral consequences for Fine Gael if it did not change tack. It forecast that by 2012 its support in a general election would decline to 13.9 per cent if the electoral trend of the previous 20 years remained the same. Instead it has managed to replace Fianna Fáil as the biggest party in the State in 2011.

The fact that Fine Gael could reverse the graph so dramatically shows what can be achieved but it will take a lot of luck and political courage for Fianna Fáil to find a similar trajectory. One of the key messages of the election was that the Irish electorate is relatively conservative. Positioning itself as a responsible centre party is Fianna Fáil’s best hope of recovering a sizeable chunk of the votes Fine Gael “borrowed” from it this time around.