Fianna Fáil: the inevitable party of government?

Ireland’s former natural party of government had been written off as a political force until recently. For a party whose TDs had rarely visited the Opposition benches throughout the 20th century, this was some fall from grace.

Despite entering government after the 2020 General Election, weak showings at the polls were accompanied by a chorus of political analysts wondering what it was that Fianna Fáil stood for and what kind of future the party may have.

The ideological positionings of Sinn Féin and Fine Gael were clear. While Fianna Fáil has traditionally drawn strength from its centrist, ‘all things to all people’ positioning, it now faced organised political machines on its left and right. The political ground was shifting beneath its feet; a more normal left/right divide had emerged.

Irrelevance beckoned as this pulling of the electorate in either direction threatened to whittle the party’s support away: in both June 2020 and February 2021, the Ipsos MRBI poll had the party at a mere 14% support.

More recently, the party has stabilised at around 20%. It has benefited from the public seeing Fianna Fáil ministers in office and enacting policy change, whether or not those actions are popular, thereby ensuring greater recognition for its TDs from the casual observer of politics.

The question that arises is whether this stabilisation is a staging post on a downward trend or an inflection point, where the party will continue to travel upwards.

The best strategy open to the party, at this point, is to consolidate its present position and make itself indispensable to either a Sinn Féin-led or Fine Gael-led government.

It is clear that both Fine Gael and Sinn Féin are the big beasts in their respective right-wing and left-wing corners. Indeed, Fine Gael almost exclusively occupies the centre-right space. Sinn Féin competes with several parties, but is considerably larger, and many of those smaller left-wing parties benefited from its unfortunate candidate strategy in 2020 General Elections. It seems likely that Sinn Féin will not only grow in the next election, given polls, but will cannibalise the seats of other left-wing parties, making it increasingly dominant.

And Leo Varadkar has said in the past that one of the greatest political threats to Fine Gael is the emergence of a party further to its right[1]. The re-emergence of a Progressive Democrats-like party would put pressure on Fine Gael in a way that no party today does. With the centre of political gravity in Ireland, and elsewhere, moving towards a more interventionist State, it’s not clear what appetite there is for that, but it is possible.

So it seems that any future Irish government will likely have to be led by either Sinn Féin or Fine Gael (assuming Fine Gael regresses to its mean level of support).

Fianna Fáil’s somewhat nebulous centrism — on one hand an apparently fatal weakness, what do they stand for? — will allow it be a bedfellow for either. Cultural differences seemed insurmountable for a Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalition but were overcome in the name of power, and so it will likely prove for the cultural barriers to a Sinn Féin-Fianna Fáil link up.

The Taoiseach after the next election will be Mary Lou McDonald, but who will be Tánaiste: Jim O’Callaghan or Darragh O’Brien?

The coalition arithmetic will come down to simple logic. Sinn Féin and Fine Gael cannot be in coalition because their political positionings would make such a government incoherent (to put it mildly). As already canvassed, Fine Gael has no other right-wing party to look to and the present ‘more centre than left’ parties, e.g., the Greens, will be too small to support it in government on their own.

Similarly for Sinn Féin on the lookout for junior coalition partners, the other left-wing parties lack scale. The inter-familial bickering of SocDems and Labour will allow them to be squeezed and their candidates picked off by Sinn Féin, which should — but likely will not — hasten their logical merger.

Regardless, Sinn Féin seem unlikely to break much beyond 50–60 TDs in the next Dáil and will require a bigger partner than the likes of Labour or SocDems, or all of them rolled together.

Consequently, no matter what way you cut the numbers, if Fianna Fáil can hold its 20% positioning then it will likely be required by both of Sinn Féin and Fine Gael to form any stable government after the next election. If the Balkanisation of Irish politics into greater numbers of smaller parties is our political future, then maybe there will never be another Fianna Fáil Taoiseach, but there may well be several more Fianna Fáil Tánaistí.

Such a strategy will not be easy. Sinn Féin’s march to the centre continues and Fine Gael hovers only ever so slightly to the centre-right, which will require deft manoeuvring from Fianna Fáil to present themselves convincingly as bland enough to be amenable to all, but not so bland as to be meaningless.

Despite previous warnings of its demise, Fianna Fáil may well just become, if not the natural party of government, then the inevitable party of government.

[1] Saving the State: Fine Gael from Collins to Varadkar, Collins and Meehan, p 417.