The Cedar Lounge Revolution

The calm before the storm… April 22, 2010

There’s a point in the current Backroom column in the Sunday Business Post which I very much agree with.

We maybe enjoying a quiet year in Irish politics, at least by recent standards.

There are no elections scheduled, no referendums and we may get by with just the one budget. Having come through Lisbon, Nama and its budgetary hurdles, the government looks more stable than it did six months ago. Without wanting to tempt fate (or perhaps wanting to), the prospect of an election has diminished considerably.

If the last two Dáils can be used as a benchmark- both ran for their full five years – we are only a bit more than halfway through the life of the 30th Dáil. Nonetheless, this benchmark will bring no respite for the backroom teams, for whom all eyes will be focused on 2012.

It certainly feels as if the political environment has settled down again after two years of near chaos and often daily mayhem. That there are no truly significant events on the horizon other than the Budget (and that is still eight or so months away) is a blessing to the Government, and a problem for the opposition. For the latter to shine they need something to gain traction on. Process led issues aren’t quite good enough.

That we’ll go all the way to 2012. Well, now. There’s optimism for you. Still, if we make it to this time next year, yes, I think the chances for doing so will be high enough. But… who knows whether the Green Party will get itchy feet and want to walk as a gesture of belated independence? The problem for them is that they need time, time to demonstrate that participation has been worth it. Stephen Collins is always advocating the withdrawal from Government line as a credible electoral measure, but I’m pretty sceptical of its efficacy.

As to the opposition, their situation is a neat inverse of that of the Green Party.

Their great fear, of course, will be that an economic recovery will make Fianna Fáil competitive by 2012.Gilmore, in particular, has been careful not to fall into the ‘negativity’ trap. In his new year radio appearance on RTE, he was positively upbeat about the economy’s prospects and has been continuously sensitive to the charge of playing politics with the economy.

I’m not so sure. It would be foolish to ever count Fianna Fáil out, but, Backroom him or her self points to a couple of small flaws in any resurgence plan that Cowen et al may have.

Let’s assume for the moment, though, that Lenihan is right. It is not difficult to guess the Fianna Fáil election narrative: we took the hard decisions, we faced down the vested interests and the trade unions and we have put this country on the road to recovery following the worst global recession in 80 years.

To be honest, it’s pretty threadbare. Fianna Fáil’s complicity in causing the recession will probably be enough to sweep the party from power.

And that’s the thing. It is pretty threadbare. Few even in FF would genuinely believe that righting a ship they were in large measure responsible for tipping over is sufficient to grant them the keys to the kingdom again. And it is all too noticeable how FF Ministers avoid accepting any responsibility for the recent past. That won’t wash. That said hard to disagree with the following:

It is an issue that Labour will take particularly seriously. The party knows that a recovery in Fianna Fáil support – and everybody believes some recovery will come – may well be at the expense of Labour’s high poll ratings. It also realises that the party is squeezed in contests in which Fine Gael is credible enough to challenge Fianna Fáil directly.

And one way or another it seems unlikely that there won’t be some strengthening of FF support. Not above 30, I’d suspect, but pushing towards that figure. No wonder the LP is so keen to reach out to FF voters. To remain in the game they must get 15 per cent at a minimum and preferably more again.

I’ve argued previously that it might well, in terms of simple power – and seats at the cabinet table, make more sense for a strengthened Labour Party to go into coalition with a weakened Fianna Fáil, albeit only if the latter had fewer numbers than the LP. That seems unlikely to happen, at least at the moment, and in any case it might be necessary to do deals with other parties to make up numbers, something I doubt the LP would countenance (albeit they might consider how the WP prospered during the FG/LP coalitions of the 1980s, and again how DL prospered during the FF/LP coalition of the early 1990s). But truth is that that door, even were it available, would be hugely difficult even in simple terms of the optics of giving FF another four or five years in power.

Incidentally, just for the record these generalised analyses sit somewhat detached from my own political preferences. I know what I’d like, but I also know that is highly unlikely to occur. But that said I don’t think it’s a pointless exercise to work through what combinations may happen. It’s an harmless diversion for me, and… the political shape of the next ten years will be dictated by government formation, just as the shape of the last ten years were. And while it is true that centre and centre right tropes dominate I suspect that, had for example FF and the LP been in coalition since 1997 there would have been some distinctive (and perhaps in some limited areas substantive) differences in terms of many policies, policies which directly impact upon workers, as well as impacts on the viability of the further left in all its forms which might have found the terrain a little more congenial given that the LP was in government. So weighing up government composition is important.

But then politics, and left politics in particular, has always been multi-stranded. We campaign where we can and we keep an eye on the bigger picture.