What’s the best way of establishing yourself as a small political party? Start off as a large political party. And preferably one that has served a term in government.
Being in power is a bruising experience. It has always been so for smaller parties. Look at Labour in 2016; the Greens in 2011; the Progressive Democrats in 2007. All were eviscerated by an ungrateful electorate, for being unpopular, or over-promisers, or just irrelevant. For them the bitter experience is well captured by US Democratic politician Dick Tuck’s memorable but rude phrase after he lost the California senate primary in 1962: “The people have spoken, the bastards.”
In the past, larger parties tended to escape the same kind of walloping. Sure, they shipped big defeats but none that put a question mark over their existence. As recently as 2007, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour won 148 of the 166 seats in the Dáil between them.
But big changes were afoot even then. Society was more prosperous, less traditional, less rural, less conservative, more urbanised and much more fragmented.
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The hegemony of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael was slipping. We saw the first signs of it when Fine Gael had a calamitous election in 2002. For most of that decade, Fianna Fáil rode high on the hog, styling itself as the “natural party of government”. But that lasted only as long as the Celtic Tiger did. That boom era had, in some ways, masked the demise of Fianna Fáil’s base. Voters backed a winner as long as the good times lasted but quickly deserted the party when everything went south.
The best lines of The Party, Dick Walsh’s book on Fianna Fáil are its opening lines. He recounts a conversation his father had with a neighbour in Co Clare when he was young.
“We’re Fianna Fáil,” said the old neighbour, “and always were. Ever since the Rising.”
“Since 1916?” said my father, raising his eyebrows.
“Since 1798,” said the old man, who knew what every believer knew: there always was a Fianna Fáil and there would always be.”
The fact of the matter is that the old fealties and loyalties to Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are no more and have been on a downward trajectory for well over a quarter of a century.
They are now medium-size parties, with little prospect in the near future of becoming big parties again. Indeed, there is a fair chance, that one or other of them will become a small party over the next decade. Sinn Féin is also a medium-size party. It is growing and may grow enough to be the dominant party in the next government.
The point is that it will have to dramatically buck the trend if it is going to avoid an electoral walloping after its first term in government.
All the evidence points that way, not just here but throughout Europe. I was reminded of Tuck’s maxim after reading Jennifer Bray’s report on new research on people’s trust in government across six European countries. The findings from the Peritia project (funded by the EU) were dismal. Almost half of respondents in Ireland (48 per cent) said they do not trust the Government to be honest and truthful, while 58 per cent believe it communicates inaccurate and biased information. Some 45 per cent of respondents think the Government ignores rules and procedures.
The only consolation is that governments in the five other countries in the study fared equally as badly in most cases, and worse in the case of the UK.
Findings like these remind politicians they have to work really hard to gain the trust of the electorate and to ensure they do their work honestly.
They also remind us that trust in government is a reflection on the electorate. My own sense is that the electorate has grown increasingly cynical and negative over the past decade. The contempt in which politicians are held by some has been amplified by the angry swarm of wasps otherwise known as social media. There has always been a “none of the above” cohort but it is growing, in my view. There’s a fair swathe of voters who will cast a protest vote at each election and will then be quickly disappointed with its choice if that party deigns to enter government.
It’s hard to see at this juncture Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael substantially reversing their losses from 2020. You can guarantee that both will run scare campaigns along the lines of “can you trust Sinn Féin to run the country and not tax you out of existence?”.
A little like Labour in the run up to the 2011 election, Sinn Féin has adopted a strong oppositional stance since 2020, and has already made scores of spending commitments that will be impossible to deliver. On the other hand, it has modified some of its policies, even its scared cows. Its tentative recognition of the Special Criminal Court, for example, is a sea change. As it the abrupt ending of its conditional attitude towards Russia. There will be more. For example, if it goes into government in 2025, it will have to be unequivocal in its support for the Garda and the Defence Forces, now and in the past. That is a trust deficit that has not yet been remedied.
The party is not going to govern alone so will have to broker a deal with another medium-sized party (most likely Fianna Fáil and most likely after many months of wrangling). It can blame it for all the broken promises that will need to be made. That will only get it so far. If Sinn Féin gets into power, unless it’s been sprinkled with magic dust, its fate coming out of government will be the same as most other northern European parties over the past two decades. Welcome to modern politics. The people have spoken.