Since the start of the campaign, pundits and observers have complained that it has been dull and unexciting. That there have been few dramatic developments or sudden moves to grab people’s attention. Well, no longer. The campaign has just got very lively indeed, and a huge amount now hangs on tomorrow evening’s televised debate between the three leaders of the largest parties.
The coming days now present the Taoiseach and Fine Gael leader Simon Harris with the biggest challenge of his political career, the fight of his life. An intense spotlight will fall on Harris – who, unlike his two main rivals for the Taoiseach’s job, has not been through this before – as the race enters the home straight.
He has had a difficult few days, after a brusque encounter with disability care worker Charlotte Fallon in Co Cork on Friday night, an encounter which – of course – was filmed and went viral online. Harris scrambled to backtrack, fronting up and apologising. In truth, Harris wasn’t all that beastly to Fallon; at worst he was dismissive and impolite. Too much was probably made of it. But that’s what happens in an election campaign, isn’t it?
It was the second time in a matter of days that Harris found himself apologising or clarifying. At the first leaders’ debate – the 10-way boondoggle on RTÉ last Monday – he insisted that he had not “signed” the contract for the National Children’s Hospital when he was minister for health. He spent the following day insisting that he was not trying to dodge responsibility for the overspends. He may have been technically right. But sometimes that’s not what matters in an election campaign, is it?
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In truth, the Kanturk incident was the latest in a series of missteps for the Fine Gael campaign, which began with Michael O’Leary’s comments about teachers, and which have seen the party fritter away a substantial lead. The party’s rating is down to where it was before Leo Varadkar resigned, while Harris’s personal rating falls again today by four points, after a five-point drop in the last poll.
The challenge for the party and its leader now is to avoid tipping into freefall, to rally the troops, and to focus the debate on those areas which are friendlier to Fine Gael.
So expect a renewed focus on the economy in the coming days, and the threat to Ireland’s prosperity from the incoming Trump administration. The problem for Harris is that his party has spent much of the campaign so far making a series of lavish spending promises. That has not gone unnoticed – nearly seven out of 10 voters say that the parties have been promising too much.
For Fianna Fáil, a two-point gain today, combined with the fall in Fine Gael support, sees it top the charts for the first time since before the last election. On the basis of today’s numbers, Micheál Martin is on track to return to the Taoiseach’s office after the election – which would constitute a remarkable achievement for someone who took over his party in 2011 when its very existence looked uncertain.
Fianna Fáil is reckoned to be in a stronger position than Fine Gael in the constituencies due the strength of its ground game and the added factor of all those Fine Gael retirements. The two old frenemies will also – the poll suggests – transfer strongly to one another, with over half of their voters saying they will transfer to the other. So where Fine Gael candidates are eliminated, that will benefit Fianna Fáil candidates, and vice versa.
For Sinn Féin, the poll confirms that the bleeding has stopped – a marginal increase to 20 per cent puts the party in advance of Fine Gael and nipping at Fianna Fáil’s heels. A strong final week could see it repeat the performance of 2020 and win the largest share of votes – if it does so, it could well be the largest party in terms of Dáil seats this time. That would be some turnaround from where the party was a few months ago.
The smaller parties continue to fight their corner. The Social Democrats are up two to 6 per cent, while the Greens and People Before Profit both go up a point. Labour is down one. All movements with the margin of error. The Independents are down by three points to 17.
With just days to go, the numbers suggest clearly that the likely outcome of the election will be a return of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to government. Sinn Féin will need a large and late surge that is not evident in these numbers if it is to have anything like the numbers required for a left-wing majority. That’s not impossible, but there’s no sign it’s on the cards.
We have seen in the US election how late swings can confound pollsters. That said, in 2020, all the parties won a share of the vote on election day that was within a point of their result in the final Ipsos poll.
But if something like today’s results are repeated, then the two bigger parties would need help to construct a majority. That could conceivably come from Independents. Or from the Greens, or Labour, or the Social Democrats. Where would that leave the attempts by Labour and the Greens (the Soc Dems have been tight-lipped about it) to construct a left-wing alliance?
Those are questions that can only be answered after the election results. For the final few days of campaigning, the dominant questions are different.
Will the prospect of a return of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to power galvanise voters into coalescing around an alternative led by Sinn Féin?
Can there be a Shinner surge of sufficient size?
What role does the economy – and worries about the future of corporation tax receipts – play in the final days, after a campaign that has focused on big spending promises and very little consideration of a less than rosy future?
And finally, and perhaps crucially, how will the leaders debate on Tuesday night affect the outcome? Could it produce another dramatic shift?
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