Election outcome still wide open despite polls

A Fianna Fáil campaign to promote the idea of the formation of a Fianna Fáil/Labour government after the June 2007 election is currently in full swing, writes Garret FitzGerald.

Of course the ministerial proponents of this idea are not naive enough to believe it to be likely that after the election Labour would reverse engines on the issue on which they had just fought the election, which would involve calling a special conference to ditch their leader.

The truth is, of course, that one way or the other the election is likely either to return Fianna Fáil to power with support from a party or parties other than Labour plus some Independents, or else to install a Fine Gael/Labour/Green Party government, also supported by some Independents.

The only circumstance in which a Fianna Fáil/Labour coalition could arise as a real issue would be if Sinn Féin, finding itself holding the parliamentary balance of power, were to vote against both candidates for office, Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny, leaving a deadlocked Dáil.

But no one, either in Fianna Fáil or amongst commentators promoting this scenario, has explained why Sinn Féin would adopt such a course. Quite apart from the fact that such a disruptive approach would risk the collapse of their newly strengthened electoral support were a second election to be called to resolve such a crisis, this would also involve their throwing away a golden opportunity to influence the future political agenda by supporting a Fianna Fáil-led government.

No, Fianna Fáil are much too politically astute to believe that Sinn Féin would act in such a way in the aftermath of an election that seems certain to yield them an increase in their Dáil strength. This Fianna Fáil propaganda campaign has two clear objectives. First, it is designed to hit support for Labour and to damage the credibility of the Fine Gael/Labour electoral alliance. Second, and even more important to Fianna Fáil, it is designed to divert attention from the fact that despite a recent improvement in Fianna Fáil's support in the polls, that party's continuation in power is now almost certainly dependent on Sinn Féin voting for Bertie Ahern as taoiseach when the new Dáil meets in six months time. Fianna Fáil needs that reality to be obscured, because it is precisely this possibility that is potentially fatal to their return to power.

Months ago the Taoiseach moved cleverly to reduce this danger by choosing the Sunday Independent as the recipient of an "exclusive" statement by him to the effect that after the election he would neither bring Sinn Féin into government nor seek their support for his nomination as taoiseach.

But neither of these were ever on, because of course he knows that if their support would be necessary for his nomination as taoiseach they would happily vote for him without being asked to do so with a view to getting into a position to influence government policy thereafter - just as some Independents were able to do for the benefit of their constituencies between 1997 and 2002.

By offering this "exclusive" to the Sunday Independent, Bertie Ahern effectively ensured that this anti-Sinn Féin paper would be inhibited from exposing the fact that in his statement he had been most careful not to rule out accepting unsought Sinn Féin support for his nomination as taoiseach.

Fianna Fáil's nightmare, of course, is that during the actual election campaign the Opposition will pounce on this deliberate evasion, exposing the fact with Sinn Féin likely to win more seats than the PDs, the most likely alternative to a Fine Gael/Labour/Green Party coalition would be a Fianna Fáil government, put into and maintained in power by Sinn Féin.

Michael McDowell would certainly refuse to support such a Sinn Féin-dependent government, and, whether or not the PDs were brought into an alternative Fine Gael-led government, that party would have to vote for Enda Kenny as taoiseach so as to prevent Sinn Féin from securing an influence on government.

There remains the question of what might be the outcome of a general election, applying to each constituency individually the most recent poll data. Using the post-Bertiegate MRBI poll in The Irish Times as a basis for a constituency-by-constituency analysis, I get the figures in Table 1 (June election outcome based on recent MRBI poll) as a possible outcome. Table 2 (Possible Dail vote after election of Ceann Comhairle)suggests the possible outcome of a Dáil vote on the basis of such an electoral outcome, assuming that one of the surviving Independents who abstained in 2002 would be elected as Ceann Comhairle. The even balance shown here is not contrived. It is simply what emerges from an analysis of the individual constituencies based on that recent poll.

Of course, this is merely one of many possible Dáil compositions that could emerge from an election in which the parties secured support in line with that poll - for an electoral system in which the PDs with precisely 4.68 per cent of the vote in two successive elections, secured ten seats in the first but four in the second, is inherently unpredictable.

All that is clear at this stage is that even after the recent shift in the polls towards Fianna Fáil, the outcome remains wide open.

TABLE 2

Greens                   6                       8
Sinn Fein                5
Independents          5                      3
TOTAL                68                    82
Abstained/Doubtful
Independents         4                      2
TOTAL               165                  165