Irish government eyes snap election to seize on Sinn Féin weakness

DUBLIN — It’s becoming quite a trend. As much of Europe and the rest of the world spends 2024 in campaign mode, it appears Ireland may be ready to join the election party.

Prime Minister Simon Harris has until March 2025 to put the question to the country, but Sinn Féin’s surprisingly poor performance in this month’s European and council elections may well encourage him to join Britain and France in holding a snap election — around the time America, too, will go to the polls.

Lawmakers in Ireland’s three-party government have told POLITICO that Harris may be tempted by Sinn Féin’s sudden weakness to press the advantage. That would mean holding the next parliamentary contest by November in hopes of keeping his Irish republican enemies out of power for another five years.

Harris — the social media-savvy successor to Leo Varadkar as Fine Gael leader and prime minister — faces mounting internal pressure to call an election sooner rather than later as the best way to keep his center-ground party at the helm of the Irish parliament, known as Dáil Éireann, for a record fourth straight term.

Most betting in Dáil circles on a snap election falling on one of four Fridays: October 25 or November 1, 8 or 15. Five government lawmakers who spoke to POLITICO — all granted anonymity in order to speak freely about internal party discussions — agreed it would be best to go as early as possible to avoid campaigning, literally, in the dark, since daylight savings ends in Ireland on October 27.

“Nobody wants to be freezing their bollocks off if we can avoid it. Not our own campaign teams, and certainly not the voters we’re hoping to meet on the doorstep,” said one Fine Gael lawmaker, who prefers October 25 but thinks the election date will slip into November.

Key to the timing would be how ruthlessly the government can pass a bulging in-tray of complex bills — most crucially a 2025 budget that would seek to deploy Ireland’s cash-filled coffers in vote-winning ways.

Foolish to drag things out

“If we get the budget right, it’ll never be a better time to go to the people to renew and strengthen our mandate,” said a lawmaker from Fianna Fáil, the government party that currently holds the finance ministry. “We’d be fools to drag this out to March, when Sinn Féin would be able to argue we’re afraid of the voters and clinging to power.”

While the budget is currently scheduled to be delivered October 8 by Finance Minister Michael McGrath, that date could be brought forward by one or two weeks if the Dáil is recalled early.

Adding to the air of uncertainty, McGrath might no longer be minister by then, as he’s the leading candidate to be nominated to become Ireland’s next commissioner on the EU executive in Brussels.

Behind the scenes, government lawmakers have already been briefed by their party leaders to brace for an unusually busy summer workload.

The Dáil normally sits only three days a week and takes a full two months off from mid-July to mid-September, but Monday and Friday sittings and an early recall are now in the mix.

A summer move by Finance Minister Michael McGrath to the European Commission would set the scene for a wider pre-election Cabinet reshuffle. | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images

A summer McGrath move to the European Commission would set the scene for a wider pre-election Cabinet reshuffle and give Foreign Minister Micheál Martin, the Fianna Fáil leader, a chance to elevate one or more electoral hopefuls to the top table.

Sinn Féin — long portrayed as the government-in-waiting on the back of years of consistently topping the opinion polls — was left reeling from council and European results that saw its support plummet below 12 percent, less than half the figure it anticipated. Sinn Féin lost votes, in particular, to new anti-establishment voices on the right preaching hostility to immigration.

The party has launched an internal review into how it got its campaign tactics and strategy so wrong, and vows to reverse its fortunes dramatically.

A short, sharp review

“We’re going to have a short, sharp review and then we’ll be about the business for preparing for the general election,” said Louise Reilly, Sinn Féin’s spokesperson on workers’ rights, trade and employment.

Referring to problems dogging the current government, she said: “People will reflect on the 14,000 homeless people, on the fact that [hospital] waiting lists are spiraling out of control, that rents are the highest in Europe. We just need to refocus voters’ minds on the failures of the government.”

The government’s inner circle appears determined to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2019, when Sinn Féin was given sufficient space and opportunity to reorganize and rebound.

At that time, Varadkar’s Fine Gael minority government thumped Sinn Féin at local and European level, but then chose to fight all four parliamentary by-elections triggered by the EU results rather than call a snap general election.

Fine Gael lost all four by-elections. That re-energized Sinn Féin and set the stage for the party to surge ahead of both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in the popular vote in the February 2020 general election, a shock that spurred both establishment parties to partner in government for the first time.

An election gift

Ireland once again faces four by-elections following results that will send four sitting lawmakers (Fianna Fáil’s Barry Cowen, Sinn Féin’s Kathleen Funchion, Labour’s Aodhan Ó Ríordáin and independent Michael McNamara) to the European Parliament.

With one eye on what happened in 2019, few lawmakers believe the government will allow potentially hazardous by-elections to happen this time. Calling an early national vote would pre-empt the risk.

“We have the Shinners [Sinn Féin] on the back foot for a change and we need to keep them there,” a second Fianna Fáil lawmaker told POLITICO. “Waiting to the last possible moment next year isn’t clever politics. Whatever government business we don’t finish in this term of office we’ll finish in the next.”

A Fine Gael colleague agrees. “We’ve been handed a gift by the electorate that we never, in all honesty, expected to get. But it has an open-by date on it and that date is November 15.”

This timing would be particularly difficult for one opposition leader, Holly Cairns of the left-wing Social Democrats. The Cork lawmaker has just announced she’s 17 weeks pregnant – meaning a due date in November.

“In my naivety, we were trying to plan around having a baby and maybe them being a year or so old before going into a general election,” she told Irish state broadcasters RTÉ. “We learned the hard way that it’s not always that easy to plan.”