Lessons to be Learned from Elections

23/06/09

The dust has now settled on what was presented by sections of the establishment media as an ‘epoch-defining’ election.

The 2009 local elections in the Twenty-Six Counties and European elections across the country took place against the backdrop of a capitalist crisis, mounting unemployment, bank bail-outs and cuts to essential public services.

As anger mounted, pre-election polling indicated that support for Fianna Fáil would be drastically reduced. The depth of anger at the state bailing out banks, construction firms and developers, while simultaneously cutting welfare rates and public services had manifested itself at various intervals over the preceding year.

The demonstration by pensioners last December shook the Fianna Fáil/Green Party coalition and resulted in the resignation of one Fianna Fáil TD and the withdrawal of support of independent TD Finian McGrath. Several months later, workers mobilised in their tens of thousands to protest at the Dublin government’s handling of the economy and the imposition of a pay levy.

The local and European elections provided a potential barometer of the extent of the electorate’s anger. Given the circumstances, one might have expected a significant shift to the left. As it transpired, the results were mixed. While the historic dominance of Fianna Fáil at local government level has been broken and some left parties have made advances, Fine Gael, whose policy is to further decimate public services, now hold 40 per cent of council seats in the Twenty-Six Counties.

As the opinion polls predicted, Fianna Fáil were the big losers of the election. Support for the party fell to the lowest level since its formation, garnering just 25 per cent of the vote.

In Dublin, the Soldiers of Destiny are now under considerable pressure, having lost half their seats on the City Council, where they won just six seats and 18 per cent of the vote. Across Dublin City and County, Fianna Fáil’s support fell to an all-time low of 17 per cent.

The Green Party’s decision to enter coalition with Fianna Fáil and its abandonment of a range of core policies sealed its fate: the party was decimated. It lost all of its council seats in Dublin, has no representation on any of the four local authorities and faces complete wipe-out at the next general election.

The Labour Party, particularly in Dublin, emerged victorious: it now holds 45 local authority seats, a major improvement on its 2004 tally of 34 seats. With 19 of the 52 seats on Dublin City Council, it has completely eclipsed both Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin, who sit on just six seats each. Having benefited from the swing away from Fianna Fáil, particularly amongst public sector workers, the Labour Party now holds a pivotal position in the capital and is poised to make major gains at the next general election. Advances for the Labour Party, however, tied as it is to the notion of coalition with Fine Gael and ‘social partnership’, can hardly be considered a victory for the left.

A significant aspect of the election was the rise of smaller left-wing parties and independents. The Socialist Workers Party, in the form of the People Before Profit Alliance, made an electoral breakthrough, winning a total of five seats; two seats each in Dún Laoghaire/Rathdown and Dublin City Council and one in South Dublin County Council.

Meanwhile, the Socialist Party consolidated its base in Fingal, winning three seats and leaving it in prime position to re-take the seat Joe Higgins lost in Dublin West at the 2007 general election. However, the party still has no organisational presence in the City Council area and ran no candidates there.

Left-wing independents Cieran Perry and Maureen O’Sullivan were elected in the Cabra and North Inner City wards of the Dublin Central constituency of the late Tony Gregory. The strong support at local government level for this combination of left parties and independents delivered an EU Parliament seat in Dublin for Socialist Party leader Joe Higgins at the expense of incumbents Mary Lou McDonald of Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil’s Eoin Ryan.

While there was a decisive swing away from Fianna Fáil, particularly in the capital, with those to the left making gains, Sinn Féin failed to build on its success in the 2004 election. Five years ago, the party topped the poll in nine of the 14 wards in which it won seats and captured its first EU seat in the Twenty-Six Counties with 60,000 votes and 14 per cent of the vote. Almost one-in-five (19 per cent) of the electorate in the Dublin City Council area voted Sinn Féin, while it averaged 11 per cent across the city and county.

In the recent election, the Sinn Féin vote in Dublin City fell from 19 per cent to 12 per cent and, in three of the six wards where it won seats, it was in a battle for the last seat. In South Dublin County Council, while its vote fell from 15 per cent to 11 per cent, it managed to hold its three seats. Meanwhile, the Sinn Féin EU candidate shed 13,000 votes since 2004 and the vote dropped to 11 per cent. While the party continues to retain considerable support within many working class areas of Dublin, in the context of the crisis of capitalism, the Fianna Fáil meltdown and a rise in support for the broad left in the city, the results were a serious setback. Following the resignation of Christy Burke in the days following the election, the party currently holds nine council seats, six in the City and three in South Dublin, and has no representation on either Fingal or Dún Laoghaire/Rathdown councils.

The basis of Sinn Féin’s decline in the capital is, in part, a legacy of the 2007 general election when, in attempting to make itself acceptable to Fianna Fáil in the event of a coalition deal, the party abandoned the essence of its economic policy. The haste with which the Sinn Féin leadership jettisoned long held policy commitments to increase corporation tax, capital gains tax and income tax on the wealthy, appeared to the electorate as opportunistic in the extreme. The subsequent media interventions by its party leader were disastrous.

While the party continued to decry the inequalities created by the Celtic Tiger economy, it sought to separate cause from effect. The gross levels of inequality fostered during the economic boom originated in the very favourable tax regime for the owners of capital and property. While ‘wage restraint’ was demanded of workers, profits for business soared. Calls by leading Sinn Féin representatives for the development of a ‘rights based, equality centred society’ were meaningless in the face of a tax regime that favoured the rich and institutionalised inequality. In the end, they were stranded: middle class voters already had at least five establishment parties from which to choose, while working class voters felt betrayed. Expectations of winning 10 Leinster House seats and getting bums on cabinet seats were dashed; Sinn Féin lost one of its two seats in Dublin and failed to win any new seats, returning to Leinster House with just four TDs.

The Sinn Féin leadership’s mistaken belief that, by borrowing Fianna Fáil’s political clothes, they could do to them what had been done to the SDLP in the North was cruelly exposed. The middle ground of Twenty-Six County politics is crowded territory and the space for another social democratic party is limited.

Since the 2007 election, opposition to the Lisbon Treaty notwithstanding, Sinn Féin has continued to move closer to the centre, supporting the bank guarantee scheme and increasingly hitching its political future to the Labour Party, who, when last in government, initiated an amnesty for rich tax dodgers.

Sinn Féin has demanded to be taken seriously by the media on the basis that it has published policy documents dealing with the jobs catastrophe. However, its much publicised job creation plan, Getting Ireland Back to Work, while containing some interesting initiatives, proposes a central role for venture capitalists in order to ‘save the economy’. According to the Sinn Féin document: “venture capital as a method of business investment has never been more important especially in terms of a difficult environment for business loans and the collapse in IPO (trade in stocks and shares).”

It goes on to quote approvingly from Paul Rellis, managing director of Microsoft Ireland, who argues that, in relation to the so-called innovation economy: “there is a chance for Ireland to be a world leader in emerging sectors by pumping in venture capital.”

This is an extraordinary statement for a party which has the establishment of a democratic socialist republic as its ultimate stated objective. The further opening up of the Twenty-Six County economy and the commercialisation of the state’s knowledge base and university sector in the interests of parasitic venture capitalists will simply exacerbate already existing inequalities and allow private capital interests determine future research projects and ensure they cream off the profits of state investment in education.

Much of these developments have historical resonance. Parties that have won considerable support from the Dublin working class take this support for granted at their peril.

Fianna Fáil has, since its foundation in 1926, attracted significant support from the urban working class; indeed, since first taking power in 1932, its vote has rarely fallen below 40 per cent in Dublin. However, over the last decade, its support, particularly at local government level, has come under pressure from the left in general and Sinn Féin in particular. The story of the rise of the Sinn Féin vote in the capital was equally a story of the decline of Fianna Fáil, whose republican rhetoric, populist appeal and deftness at operating the parish pump won considerable support.

By the early 1990s, however, the Soldiers of Destiny could no longer rely on the unquestioning loyalty of working class communities, who had suffered the scourge of drug addiction and crime, unemployment and emigration. For decades, Fianna Fáil had facilitated profiteering construction bosses and developers through corrupt planning deals, ensuring local councillors and senior government ministers amassed considerable personal fortunes. As evidence of this corruption emerged in the public domain, their populist appeal waned.

That Sinn Féin’s support came at the expense of Fianna Fáil was not all that surprising: the Labour Party’s decision to completely ignore the national question and its support for Fine Gael in government rendered it largely irrelevant to many working class communities. In the absence of a significant left-wing opposition, Fianna Fáil’s populist claim to represent the interests of both labour and republicanism guaranteed it considerable support in working class communities.

Throughout Irish history, similar tactics have temporarily managed to secure the support of Dublin’s working class. Indeed, at the turn of the 20th Century, the Irish Socialist Republican Party, led by James Connolly, lost out to the seemingly radical Labour Election Association (LEA) in the 1899 local government election, who won one-fifth of the seats in Dublin city.

A year later, the LEA was all but wiped out: Dublin working class communities were not to be fooled a second time by empty rhetoric and corrupt practices. Fifty years later, Clann na Poblachta burst onto the political scene in the Twenty-Six Counties, winning 10 seats at the 1948 general election, six of them in Dublin, where it won 19 per cent of the vote. Following its decision to enter coalition with the Blueshirts, the Clann’s support collapsed at the subsequent election, winning just 3 per cent of the vote in the capital in 1951.

Similarly, the Workers’ Party, having abandoned republicanism, campaigned hard in working class districts in the Twenty-Six Counties as one part of its ‘stages theory’ to ‘revolutionise’ the working class. In 1989, it won seven Leinster House seats, winning 11 per cent of the vote in Dublin, where five of its seven TDs were elected. Just three years later, its leadership attempted to liquidate the party and reconstitute it as a social democratic party; six of its seven TDs, including current Labour Party leader Eamonn Gilmore, former leader Pat Rabbitte and its Dublin MEP Prionsias de Rossa, left to form New Agenda/Democratic Left. By 1999, they had, as was predicted at the time of the split with the Workers’ Party, merged with the Labour Party. There is simply not the political space in the Twenty-Six Counties for two social democratic parties.

There are clear lessons in all of this for parties of the radical left. Throughout modern Irish history, many parties claiming to campaign in the interests of the working class have sought a short-cut to power by propping up the right-wing establishment. The latest manifestation of this is Sinn Féin and they are currently paying the price for pitching to the centre, becoming increasingly indistinguishable from the Labour Party. The loss of an EU Parliament seat in Dublin to Joe Higgins demonstrates that working class voters seek consistent opposition to the right-wing establishment.

There are considerable challenges facing the left in the time ahead. The jobs’ catastrophe has been created by a neo-liberal system which the political establishment, including the Labour Party, wishes to codify within the EU structures through the Lisbon Treaty. The re-run of the referendum on that Treaty offers an opportunity for the left to campaign once again to reject the neo-liberal and militarist bent of the European Union.

Over the last five years, the left in Dublin has worked effectively within the Shell to Sea campaign. That campaign is reaching a crucial point as Shell Oil and its mercenaries move closer to completing the destruction of the Erris Peninsula. Campaigning for the nationalisation of Ireland’s natural resources and their utilisation in the interests of the population needs to be stepped up.

Fianna Fáil’s decimation at the local elections will undoubtedly precipitate central government funding cuts to local authorities. Local services to working class communities will be worst hit, while attempts to impose water charges are inevitable. Determined and well-organised opposition will be required.

The continued British occupation and process of normalisation in the Six Counties must also be consistently challenged and those who claim to represent the radical left cannot continue to hide from this.

The recent decision by éirígí to participate in elections at a time of the party’s choosing presents significant challenges, not least in ensuring that elections and elected institutions do not become paramount issues in the struggle.

In the three years since its foundation, éirígí has campaigned on a range of issues alongside those seeking fundamental social and economic change in Ireland and this work needs to continue and expand. The crucial work of building a political alternative and securing real social and economic change will not happen within parliamentary institutions – it will take place in deprived communities, on the streets and in the workplace.