After a somewhat lacklustre campaign, the results of the Northern Ireland local elections have shown strong gains for Sinn Féin, which has overtaken the DUP to be the largest party in terms of council seats, building on its vote in last year’s Stormont Assembly election.
It is a notable success for the party, now comfortably the biggest in Northern Ireland. It ran a strong campaign and gained 39 council seats, bringing its total to 144.
Sinn Féin, not surprisingly, is presenting the results as a vindication of its desire to get Stormont up and running again. However, it remains to be seen if the DUP is prepared to go back to Stormont, given its opposition to the terms of the Windsor Framework, the revised agreement on post-Brexit trading arrangements. The strong support for Sinn Féin also suggests that many voters see the DUP’s tactics also being driven by a reluctance to accept the election of Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill as First Minister.
There has been speculation that the DUP would agree to reform the Executive after the local elections, perhaps having first tried to get more concessions from the British government on the Windsor Framework. The DUP held its 122 seats, and with the TUV winning just nine seats and the UUP losing heavily, it has solidified its position as the voice of unionism.
Elsewhere the Alliance Party, whose rise in the 2019 local elections was seen as evidence of a developing middle ground, made some further gains and is now the third largest party in the local councils, moving ahead of both the SDLP and the UUP. Smaller parties also got squeezed.
So what happens next? A strong majority of voters support parties in favour of a restoration of Stormont. The governments in London and Dublin will hope for movement. The DUP, however, is unlikely to move quickly. Whether the failure of the TUV to build its support gives the DUP room for manoeuvre remains to be seen. Certainly DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson appears to have seen off the TUV threat.
The DUP needs to ask itself where its long-term interests now lie and many observers do expect it to return to Stormont later this year. Its boycott, while it may have underpinned elements of its own vote, also seems to have driven voters to Sinn Féin, who even picked up some seats in traditional unionist strongholds.
Northern Ireland needs its MLAs to do what they are elected for – fighting for funds in the light of proposed budget cuts and finding ways to improve services in key areas like healthcare. The local councils will do their jobs. But as things stand they are the only functioning democratic bodies, with a vacuum in terms of more important decisions. It is time for Northern Ireland’s MLAs to get back to work.