Kenny should be able to drive hard coalition bargain

INSIDE POLITICS:Fine Gael has often given up more than its share in deals with Labour – it could be very different this time

WHILE THE broad outlines of the election result may be clear already, the parties still have a lot to play for as the campaign enters its final days. In 2007 there was a decisive shift in the public mood just before the end so nobody is taking anything for granted this time around.

Fine Gael has had the best campaign so far and the big question now is whether it can kick on and consolidate its position or whether increasingly strident attacks from all sides will put a limit to its march.

When the Dáil was dissolved some of Fine Gael’s more optimistic TDs dared to believe it could win up to 70 seats but the consensus was that it would be somewhere between 60 and 70. The strength of the party’s campaign since then has altered expectations and some in the party are now daring to believe that an overall majority could be possible.

The success of that campaign, though, has provoked a concerted counter-attack, particularly from Labour, and the intriguing feature of the final days will be whether the Fine Gael bandwagon can be halted. At this stage it is hard to gauge whether the prospect of Fine Gael winning enough seats to be in power on its own will lead to a drift away from the party in the final days or whether it will create the momentum for a last push.

While it is now as certain as anything can be in politics that Enda Kenny will be the next taoiseach, he is wisely taking nothing for granted. Instead he has gone out of his way to insist that all talk of who will, or will not, be in government will have to wait until the voters make their decision on Friday.

The example of Neil Kinnock’s disastrous Sheffield rally in 1992, where he managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, is a salutary example of how triumphalism can backfire, even at the end of a good campaign.

Kenny has insisted a number of times during the campaign that he believes strong and stable government is imperative in the current economic conditions. That appears to be code for ruling out a minority government supported by Independents, widely regarded as the worst possible election outcome.

Former Labour minister Barry Desmond in a letter to this newspaper yesterday made a very cogent case that a plethora of Independents, with widely differing agendas, is the last thing the State needs right now.

If a Fine Gael minority government backed by Independents is not on the agenda the options narrow to the unlikely one of a Fine Gael majority government or the more likely option of a coalition with Labour. A Fine Gael government supported from the outside by Fianna Fáil is a possibility but only if it proves impossible to negotiate a deal with Labour.

The increasingly shrill battle between Fine Gael and Labour over the past week is essentially about the relative influence each party will have over policy in a coalition. While the leading figures in both parties, who are generally on good terms, will have little difficulty putting the rhetoric aside, they may have difficulty agreeing the terms of a programme for government.

The key issue is whether the budget deficit should be reduced to manageable proportions in four years, as the EU-IMF deal specifies, or whether it should be long fingered. Fine Gael is strongly of the view that the four-year target should be met while Labour wants a longer timeframe. In tandem with that Fine Gael is making soothing noises about renegotiating elements of the EU-IMF deal while Labour leader Eamon Gilmore has adopted a shrill and unexpected anti-EU tone.

The nightmare scenario is that Fine Gael and Labour would agree a coalition but would then settle down to trench warfare over every budget cut, as happened in the 1980s. This time around economic conditions are far worse and there simply isn’t the time for such endless bickering.

Leading figures in both parties point to the rainbow government of the 1990s as the kind of example they would like to follow. Given the good personal relations that exist among most sitting TDs of both parties a workable new coalition is certainly feasible. The problem is that there are significant differences on the policy front and one of the parties may have to swallow its pride.

In the past Fine Gael has given away more in terms of cabinet seats and policy positions than the relative strengths of the two parties warranted. This time around Kenny and his colleagues should be in a position to strike a harder bargain on policy. Fine Gael can’t afford to budge on the time-frame for getting the deficit down if it wants to retain its new-found status as the dominant party.

Fianna Fáil will be in a similar, if much worse, position to that in which Fine Gael found itself in 1987 when it suffered a bad defeat after four years of austerity. The net result was the Tallaght strategy in which Fine Gael supported Fianna Fáil as long as it implemented policies it had previously opposed. The strategy was good for the country and it gave Fine Gael the breathing space it needed to regroup. This time around there is a strong argument for Fianna Fáil to adopt a similar stance as long as Fine Gael follows the four-year plan.

Kenny and leading Fine Gael frontbenchers have ruled out any kind of deal with Fianna Fáil but it will lurk in the background as an alternative option as negotiations open with Labour on a coalition deal.

“Behind all the rhetoric we know that Fianna Fáil have done a lot of the heavy lifting on the public finances,” said one Fine Gael strategist. “Our choice now is to finish the job and have it over and done with by the time of the next election or to let Labour slow us down. If we let that happen we will be heading into the next election in the same position that Fianna Fáil are in now.”

Senior Labour politicians know only too well the scale of the problem and the measures required. A coalition of the two parties is still the most likely outcome but it is not the certainty it looked a few months ago.

The fate of the smaller parties could be a factor. Sinn Féin is set to make gains although precisely how many is difficult to tell. The Greens could be wiped out but if the party can eke out a couple of seats it would be in the market for a deal with Fine Gael.