Sinn Féin is set to take the office of first minister in Northern Ireland in a historic move that is making headlines across the world. But it is the rise of the nonaligned middle ground, signalled clearly in a breakthrough result for the Alliance, that may prove to be the most significant aspect of the elections, whose votes were still being counted on Friday night across Northern Ireland.
The emerging results were being digested in Dublin on Friday; with officials working on updated briefs for their political masters. Like everyone else, the Government is awaiting the final counts for a complete picture.
But already some things are clear. Dublin expects an intense period of negotiations, conducted through a number of channels. The Northern party leaders meet on Monday to plot a course forward for the assembly – or not.
The meeting will be closely watched by the Government, but there is little expectation that it will lead to a reconstitution of the powersharing administration next week. With the DUP’s participation needed for an Executive to be formed, there is likely to be intense focus on the protocol and the prospect for changes.
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Nor are officials necessarily convinced that the DUP wants to get back into government in the North even over the medium term
There are a number of barriers here, though: firstly, neither Dublin nor Brussels are 100 per cent convinced of the UK government’s bona fides when it comes to the protocol. Though UK government sources insist their goal is to agree changes to the protocol – not its abolition – that would eliminate the friction in trade between the North and Britain, the level of trust in the Johnson administration is not high. Nonetheless, the two governments have been consulting on statements in recent days – officials’ relationships remain closer than political ones.
But nor are officials necessarily convinced that the DUP wants to get back into government in the North even over the medium term. Some sources speculate that a lengthy period of wound-licking might be necessary.
DUP choices
The election is a vivid illustration for the DUP that political choices – to support Brexit, and block Theresa May’s soft Brexit – have consequences. Where the party goes now in the North is hard to say: it is likely to remain squeezed on two sides by the TUV and the UUP/Alliance. But it’s difficult to envisage a viable future for the party that doesn’t involve working the powersharing institutions.
From Dublin’s perspective, the Government has always thought Jeffrey Donaldson is someone with whom it can do business. That hasn’t changed, though the DUP leader is undoubtedly a weakened figure now.
For Sinn Féin, the election success is a historic marker and further builds the party’s political momentum. How far that extends, though, to the party’s principal goal – power in the Republic – is debatable: Northern Irish issues tend to matter little in southern politics.
Likewise, the party’s backgrounding of the united Ireland message in the Assembly campaign suggested a prioritisation of the prosaic, everyday concerns of voters rather than the constitutional question.
The emergence of Alliance as the champions of the middle ground is a challenge to a politics dominated by bifurcated tribal certainties
But perhaps the most important long-term implication of the results is the accelerating emergence of the third pillar of Northern Irish politics and society: the “neithers”, neither tribally orange nor green, identifying not as unionist nor nationalist, not British nor Irish but Northern Irish.
Political map
Just as politics in the Republic has been structurally reordered since the economic crash and great recession of a decade ago, so the decades of uneasy peace and Brexit have begun to change the political map of the North.
And just as the rise of Sinn Féin in the South has ended the old Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil duopoly, so the emergence of Alliance as the champions of the middle ground is a challenge to a politics dominated by bifurcated tribal certainties – and also to the structures of the Belfast Agreement, carefully constructed to balance the two traditions.
That presents questions about the appropriateness of the agreement’s structures for the Northern Ireland of 2022. Senior sources in Dublin acknowledge this, though stress it is a long-term question.
Even if many voters are voting Alliance as much for what the party isn’t as for what it is, there aren’t just two major political forces in the North any more; there are three. The potential for the one in the middle to be decisive on a variety of issues – including the constitutional one, if it comes to that – is obvious.
