Independents Being the Biggest “Party” Is Terrible for Everyone

Some thoughts on this week’s elections

The Irish local and European elections will be held on June 7th. These are the first national elections since immigration became the dominant issue in Irish political life, and since the status quo was given an unexpected punch in the face via the recent referendum results. Is this going to be one where non-system candidates and the populist right make a breakthrough? I’m not a pollster and I’m more interested in ideas than the horserace but I don’t think so, so I’m going to take a few minutes to work through why not and what that means.

The anti-immigration movement in Ireland is strange because it’s incredibly powerful and developed at the street level and online, and extremely undercooked at the level of electoral politics which has led to a couple of problems.

The first is that as a spontaneous, grassroots phenomenon it’s truly leaderless. There is no Irish Trump figure; no single individual or party to act as an authority to legitimise candidates and direct votes. That has led to a bewildering profusion of candidates and parties around the country, vying for a slice of the vote that is not small in overall terms but certainly far too small to accommodate the range of people running. The likely effect will be that these voices cancel each other out, and that no candidate representing those views will be elected, even in places where there is fertile ground for political success.