Spoiler Alert

Mainstream parties have forgotten how to gauge the mood of the general public: they are going to have to rediscover how to do that, or die

Ireland just had a Presidential election in which a record number of spoiled votes were cast; approximately 200,000 - 12% of the total votes cast, around ten times the rate of the last contest. This fantastic analysis by Kevin Cunningham has shown that these voters are mostly not left-wing and were therefore never likely to vote for Catherine Connolly, the candidate of the unified left, who won in a landslide. The spoiled votes have been seen as an explicit rejection by centre and right-leaning voters of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the two largest legacy parties. This election was a humiliation for them and represents a continuation of their gradual spiral into death or insignificance.

After the vote, this clip of Catholic Conservative and Irish Independent columnist David Quinn went viral, in which he argues with a young FG TD about the direction the party should take from here. He takes issue with their tendency over time to move away from socially conservative positions in pursuit of younger voters who will never support them; leaving a whole quadrant of the political compass with no representation.

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