The surprise loser from Ireland’s elections? Sinn Féin.

DUBLIN — Sinn Féin long stood atop Ireland’s opinion polls as the champion of the angry and the alienated — but has seen its anti-establishment appeal seized by even more populist nationalists hostile to immigration.

As results from Ireland’s elections for local councils and European Parliament seats are calculated, it’s already clear that voters have drastically redrawn the battle lines to Sinn Féin’s disadvantage. The unexpected level of lost support has cast doubt on the leadership of Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald and her longtime status as a prime minister-in-waiting.

Their fall from public favor has left Sinn Féin activists stunned, demoralized and speculating over whether the party needs a new leader in time for a general election that must happen by March. It could come sooner if Prime Minister Simon Harris opts to capitalize on shifting momentum.

For years, Sinn Féin appeared on the cusp of seizing power for the first time in the Republic of Ireland following decades in the political wilderness and, since 2020, as the main opposition party — a position resulting from its failure in that year’s general election to run enough candidates to exploit a ballot-topping vote.

In the years since, Sinn Féin had consistently topped 30 percent in all national polls, nearly double the combined support for the two center-ground parties in government, perennial heavyweights Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.

Conventional wisdom held that it seemed likely, if not inevitable, that Sinn Féin would overpower both parties in any rematch and lead Ireland’s next coalition government. This would give the Irish republican party a unique cross-border platform to pursue its grand strategy of uniting the state with the U.K. region of Northern Ireland, where Sinn Féin leads its revived cross-community government.

But Sinn Féin’s support has steadily slumped since November’s racist rioting in Dublin set the scene for increased public anxiety over unchecked immigration. In Friday’s elections, the true level of support crashed to levels almost nobody saw coming.

“Our strength has always been that we’re closest to the people. But we look out of touch with the public mood and the leadership isn’t really listening,” one veteran Sinn Féin activist told POLITICO in the Cabra-Glasnevin district of north Dublin, McDonald’s power base, where this reporter also lives. Here, Sinn Féin ran an ambitious four candidates for seven available Dublin City Council seats and struggled to win one.

Campaign failures

The miscalculation in McDonald’s heartland reflects the wider failures of a campaign that presumed Sinn Féin would easily overtake Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to claim pole position on Ireland’s 31 councils. These provide the seed bed for developing the next generation of national leaders.

Instead, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil resurrected their fortunes with virtually identical 23 percent shares of first preference votes, both better than expected — while Sinn Féin slumped to below 12 percent. Independents, among them a babel of new anti-immigrant voices alongside established rural mavericks, topped a staggering 21 percent.

Some Sinn Féin activists bluntly blame their leader for steering the party too close to the wishy-washy center, in hopes of making it possible to forge an eventual governing coalition with its Fianna Fáil rival.

In the final week of the campaign, Sinn Féin switched its advertising strategy to a soft focus on McDonald, bombarding social media with a Mary Lou-fronted video and plastering lampposts with her portrait and the slogan “Change starts here.” It proved a turnoff.

In the final week of the campaign, Sinn Féin switched its advertising strategy to a soft focus on McDonald. | Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images

“It’s a humiliation, but we can’t speak up. We don’t pick our leader. A handful of people at the top do,” said the grassroots organizer, who spoke on condition he wasn’t identified because, as he put it, “I don’t want to make my life a living hell. But something has to change and change fast.”

Anti-immigrant pressure

McDonald has cut a glum figure in her post-election posts and at the Royal Dublin Society conference hall in Dublin, one of several ballot-counting centers where full results aren’t expected to be announced until Wednesday night at the earliest. The glacial pace reflected Ireland’s complex system of proportional representation that encourages voters to pick candidates in order of preference — this time on absurdly long ballot papers featuring dozens of candidates.

McDonald attributed Sinn Féin’s lackluster performance, in part, to public confusion. She said many voters were wrongly treating her party as part of the governing establishment, even though it’s the main opposition in the parliament, Dáil Éireann, and never been in power south of the border.

“We’ve listened to people all across the state, their frustration, their anger. On this occasion they’ve chosen to vote for independents,” she said.

While McDonald and senior strategists — some of them Northern Ireland-based — clearly didn’t see this coming, at least some of the party’s foot soldiers did. They reported receiving strong pushback on the doorsteps from some of their more nationalist-minded voters, who wanted Sinn Féin to adopt a firmer anti-immigration stance.

The completed first-round results from the council election have shown where much of Sinn Féin’s vote went — to intemperate voices who since 2022 have led protests against asylum seekers.

Winning seats on Dublin City Council from the most impoverished quarters of the capital’s northside are Malachy Steenson and Gavin Pepper, who spent much of their campaign denouncing Sinn Féin, not the government parties. They, not Sinn Féin, cheered and waved Irish tricolors at the Dublin count center.

Pepper told Gript, a right-wing media website, in a pointed jab at McDonald’s campaign slogan: “We’re the real opposition. We’re the real change.”