The centre right/right of centre realignment… it’s on… Sort of. January 28, 2011
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Irish Politics.trackback
This is a fascinating statement from Micheál Martin.
Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin this evening said he would be prepared to support a Fine Gael minority government after the general election.
Asked in a radio interview if he would be willing to support a minority government led by Enda Kenny he said, “Yes I would. I think that’s in the interests of the people and of the country. The country and the people come first, and if the right policies are being pursued, I will support them.”
“Irrespective of whether I am in government or out of government, I will support the basic policies that will get us through this crisis, and those are the kind of policies that are within the parameters of the four-year plan.”
Whether it amounts to much more than beating ones breast and shouting ‘mea culpa, mea culpa!’ is another matter entirely, but intriguing that he’d even make it.
Or to be entirely cynical is the strategy simply to throw out a statement a day, or so, that has some eye catching content in the hope that it will keep his public profile high for the duration of the campaign.
Seems to me that he and FF might run out of things to say sharpish.
But the logic is impeccable, and it has one further virtue, it points up the fact that both Fine Gael and the Labour Party have also signed up for the essentials of the ‘four-year plan’. And the corollary of that is… or at least he might hope… that those who have been tempted by the other two parties, will come home because really, why shouldn’t they if everyone is singing off the same hymn sheet? Not to mention that he’s ‘refreshing’ FF.
Though the other thought strikes that for those hardy souls who demur from the ‘four year plan’ who once constituted FF voters and have now swung to SF or the Independents may not be quite as easy to drag back.
As to an actual right of centre realignment between FF and FG. I’ll believe it when I see it.
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
Speaking of entertaining alignments, (Ok, that was a bit a stretched link)…
Is anybody else entertained by the fact that Labour is is the sister party of Mubarak’s NDP in Egypt and Ben Ali’s CDR in Tunisia?
LikeLike
We demand a statement from Chairman Gilmour!
LikeLike
Presumably he’ll tell us that protest doesn’t achieve anything.
LikeLike
All good clean fun, but weren’t you guys outraged at Joan’s insistence that Joe H. was in some way answerable for SF policy because he was once part of a technical group with them? The link hardly seems less tenuous….
LikeLike
I wasn’t at all outraged at Burton. I was too busy laughing.
The Socialist International is a bit different from a technical group, in that it implies at least some level of common political purpose. Now it’s not a relatively coherent political movement in the way that it was back in the dim and distant past, but it is very much an organisation which claims a common vision in a broad sense.
LikeLike
I’d seen that earlier in the week when looking up the CDR on Wiki. It’s a remarkable and undercommented fact.
LikeLike
Is that true? It sounds too good to be true. Are they ‘comrades’ in the ‘Socialist’ International?
LikeLike
It’s absolutely true.
The Egyptian NDP and the Tunisian CDR are long time members of the “socialist” international. They hurriedly suspended the CDR last week, but the NDP are still up on the website:
http://www.socialistinternational.org/viewArticle.cfm?ArticlePageID=931
LikeLike
The President of the Socialist International, George Papandreau, is imposing the neoliberal solution on Greece; expect the same from Gilmore.
LikeLike
Cheers! So, Ivana Bacik and Hosni Mubarak are ‘comrades’? Hmm. And Joan Burton and Roisín Shortall are fraternal sisters of a party which has access to, and uses to bloody effect, a fully functioning mukhabarat. ‘Tis a strange world we live in. But why am I surprised? I’ll definitely be using this to batter LP canvassers with.
LikeLike
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Bosca, Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland said: Cedar Lounge Rev: The centre right/right of centre realignment… it’s on… Sort of.: This is a fascinating stateme… http://bit.ly/hRCLQX […]
LikeLike
is that labour dead? whats there function now…
LikeLike
Half clever move by the Micheál.
Drive a wedge between FG and Lab because there are more than a few in FG who don’t want to share power, and the chance to spurn the embrace of Labour and take the support from a weakened FF would puff up their egos.
They should see through it though: FF would prop up a minority FG govt. until they (FF) felt strong enough to go to the country again, then they’d pick a fight with Enda, and possibly provoke a leadership challenge in FG, and leave them going to the country as the Govt. with no one else to share the blame, and without too much to show for a few years of austerity. Labour and FF would prosper, and the disinfectant of 2/3 years of FF in opposition, and the residual bitterness towards FG for jilting them this time, would make an FF/ Lab (or FF/ Lab/ SF?) coalition plausible.
The alternative for FF is 5 years of an unassailable majority FG/ Lab govt. leaving them even competing for opposition time: do it MM’s way and they get to distance themselves from the ‘negativity’ of the opposition.
LikeLike
Its also an implicit acknowledgement that no one wants to be in government with FF for the foreseeable future. Rope-a-doping Fine Gael, maybe even picking up some right-wing transfers? Worth a try I suppose
LikeLike
Labour is competing with Sinn Fein for votes so does not want Sinn Fein in the debate. Fine Gael is not competing with Sinn Fein for votes, so it wants Sinn Fein in the debate, so as to reduce the Labour vote and reduce its power in the coalition.
F.G. will not put itself in a position where it is dependent on F.F to remain in office,-not while it has a compliant Labour Party as its junior partner in coalition.
LikeLike
According to a labour strategist (this was passed on to me tonight) the Labour Party leadership sees itself as competing with Fine Gael for votes. The attacks on Sinn Fein are to show how tough Labour is on Sinn Fein, to appease the middle class floating voter. The attacks on ULA and Joe Higgins – the ‘loony left’ – ditto.
I was quite taken back when I heard this, but they actually believe that Ireland has a huge middle class with a rump working class who live on the estates, to which Sinn Fein and the ULA are welcome.
when asked about the disaffected fianna fail public sector worker, there was no interest at all expressed by the strategist in picking up this vote. Those voters were dismissed as mainly over-50s and irrelevant to the election.
The Labour Party leadership is obsessed with capturing the middle class vote, and sees Fine Gael as its main opposition.
I mean, this is just delusional – they really think they are fighting the 2007 election all over again – but, delusional, strategy, and the Irish Labour Party …
At the same time, while that party strategist believes (along with the leadership) that Fine Gael is the real competition and the middle class the real prize, every labour party voter I’ve talked to has been quite stunned by the attacks on the ULA.
There are still three more weeks to go. Three more weeks of chasing a non-existent majority middle class, and excluding traditional labour voters in the process?
This is going to be a very f**king interesting election.
LikeLike
but they actually believe that Ireland has a huge middle class with a rump working class who live on the estates, to which Sinn Fein and the ULA are welcome.
To pick up a theme of yours, just as the left import analysis from the UK and grafts it onto a quite different society here, so do Labour: they think they’re fighting the 1997 election in the UK, where, under a quite different electoral system, and without a challenge to their left, the middle-class, southern floating voter really was who decided the outcome – but in a system that enormously over- rewards some votes and virtually discounts others.
I don’t think anyone with an ounce of sense in New Labour believed the ‘we’re all middle-class now’ thing, but they knew it appealed to exactly those people they needed to add to their reliable Northern, Scottish and inner London vote to win a majority. Unfortunately perhaps, the Irish Labour party maybe do believe it.
LikeLike
Our electoral system does reward swing voters-a relatively small shift of transfers across the country can have big effects. So the mechanics of it are comparable.
Where I agree with you is that Irish Labour doesnt have nearly the same base vote as British Labour. The hardcore, tribal Labour vote that allowed Blair to go off and do what he did must be in single percentage figures in Ireland. Unless they assume that the new support that got them to 15% or so in the last locals is that solid?
LikeLike
Our electoral system does reward swing voters-a relatively small shift of transfers across the country can have big effects. So the mechanics of it are comparable.
‘Across the country’ is the key part of that though: if the Labour vote is halved in some constituencies in Northern England or Scotland, it can still return a Labour MP (and this effect is magnified if there is a three way contest), whereas, if the FF vote halves in, say, Galway West, they can’t afford to ignore it, because it will probably mean losing a seat.
So while our system, as in the UK, does ‘reward’ swing voters,unlike the UK system, it rewards all (or most) swing voters.
LikeLike
If Labour didnt try to move into that ground, FG would take it by default and we would simply swap FG for FF as the central party in the system. Much as I disagree with the approach, you can see why they are doing it. If Gilmore wants to be Taoiseach the road leads through the suburbs, not the inner city
LikeLike
@DC
“If Labour didnt try to move into that ground, FG would take it by default and we would simply swap FG for FF as the central party in the system.”
Again, the evidence would suggest otherwise. The meltdown in FF support – the first majority drop, the drop into the low 20s – happened just after FF launched its attack on public sector workers. THe drop in FF support saw a rise in Labour support – according to some polls they were briefly the most popular party in the State. Now, those public sector workers ewent to Labour because they thought Labour would have their back. They would never go to FG because they know full well that FG would never look after them.
Not soon after that, as it became clear that Labour would NOT look after the public sector, the party’s popularity in the opinion polls began to slide. Labour had a once in a lifetime opportunity to capture one of FF’s key support bases, but they weren’t interested.
It’s not the middle class vote which was split in Ireland as much as the working class vote between FF and Labour. The Labur party had a chance to gain the lion’s share of that vote for the first time since 1920, but no. The Narida land of middle class Ireland, that became their focus, and the disaffected public sector vote has been dripping away from them ever since.
LikeLike
@DC
“If Gilmore wants to be Taoiseach the road leads through the suburbs, not the inner city”
Who ever said that the working class DON’T live in the suburbs? Where do you think the 60 per cent or so of people in working class occupations actually live?
LikeLike
I think that’s a hugely important point because it gets to the heart of the misperception by Labour as to where its support has come from. If the LP thinks the middle class, however described, is its vote its in for a huge surprise. What’s curious is that many oftheir TDs must know the reality, that they appeal to a cross party coalition of support but that they won’t do it on middle class votes alone because there simply aren’t enough of them.
There are reasons for this as well in terms of political culture. If you look at the Green Party you can see how the dangers of being amongst a peer group that thought much the same, belonged to much the same class, etc distorted their sense of the reception of their policies. They were genuinely taken aback to realise that from a position where they were seen as [and they had a self-perception] of being ‘good’ (albeit in an intangible sort of a fashion) they’d changed to being seen as as bad or worse than FF for propping them up.
Can’t help but think the LP suffers from a similar misperception.
LikeLike
It should be remembered, WbS, that Labour benefits from its social liberalism among middle and upper-middle class voters. It is also these groups that have come to dominate large chunks of the party and have the cash to support election campaigns.
The problem for Labour is that the middle classes are already getting tired of them. A lot of the Independents I see popping up have a smell of ‘right-wing of the Labour party’ about them: pro-choice, pro-Civil partnership/marriage equality, and pro-market. There are, as you point out, not enough of these to go around, but Labour is heavily dependent on them: Gilmore will definitely be relying on these votes out in Dun Laoghaire, Burton will also need them for Dublin West (especially since Joe is running). Alienating these voters could mean losing a seat. Even if they wanted to diversify, they are hampered by the scenario.
LikeLike
That’s true and I guess an argument could be made why would they want to exchange one set of those voters for a more fickle more working class set who more often tend to vote for FF. And yet I think that’s a token of the paucity of the LPs vision. They simply cannot hold together a proper cross class progressive coalition. Their inclination as has been seen time and again is to tip towards the centre [and I’m not arguing that the LP should become a Marxist party by the way] and even right of centre.
LikeLike
The Red C Poll figures are out:
http://www.thejournal.ie/fine-gael-maintains-commanding-lead-in-opinion-polls-2011-01/
Tomorrow’s Sunday Business Post/Red C polling results. figures in brackets are from last Red C Poll for Sunday Business Post, in December.
The figures in square brackets relate to the 2007 general election.
* Fine Gael: 33% (34%) [27.3%]
* Labour: 21% (23%) [10.1 %]
* Fianna Fáil: 16% (17%) [41.6%]
* Sinn Féin: 13% (14%) [6.9%]
* Green Party: 2% (2%) 4.7%]
* Ind / others: 15% (10%) [6.7%]
LikeLike
So the 3 main parties are haemorrhaging votes to Independents? Wow.
LikeLike
I see Gilmore in tve Times today was warning left wing voters that if they didnt make Labour as strong as possible, the government would be more right-wing as a result…I’ll let someone else make the obvious point 😉 but it looks as though Labour are feeling some heat on their left flank after all, if Gilmore felt the need to address it at all.
LikeLike
That is bizarre. The pool for FG type voters is small enough and presumably soaked up by… well, FG itself and the LP to a much smaller degree. The real game is former FF voters.
Here’s a small tale. I work with a fair range of public sector people and was talking to a GO the other day who was unprompted saying he wasn’t sure who he was going to vote for. He’s voted FF over the years but didn’t want to. Didn’t trust FG or Labour with being able to govern and his default option… Adams and Sinn Féin to give the rest a shock.
Now, that’s not great news for SF because that’d be a fairly floating voter who might vote for them and then revert to FF in five years. But nor is it great news for the LP because the LP isn’t speaking at all to him, working class, formerly FF, etc, etc.
LikeLike
“He’s voted FF over the years but didn’t want to.”
Yep. I mean, a couple of years back I heard Mieheal Martin say to a Labour TD on Questions and Answers that Fianna Fail are the real party of the working class in Ireland, always have been. The Labour TD just squirmed because he knew that Martin was right. The great public housing schemes of the 1930s and 1960s – they weren’t Labour schemes, they were Fianna Fail. The majority of Labour TDS up until the 1970s were rural TDs. The urban working class vote stuck with FF – these realities about the voting patterns of the Irish working class, even sown to the historical reality of a rural working class – all of this gets sidelined when the transplantation of political assumptions and tactics from other jurisdictions on Ireland, as sonofstan says above.
LikeLike
I know several people as well who would always have voted FF, out of tradition and also out of a belief that the party somehow stands for ‘the small man.’ But now they say they’re not voting for the party anymore. I think FF’s association with Fitzpatrick, Ronan and the like has seriously and perhaps permanently damaged the party’s populist credentials. But, as WBS, says, these people don’t know where they’re going next. One man described himself to me this week as a ‘political orphan.’ They certainly won’t be enthused by a Labour party which is committing itself to the road of financial orthodoxy in an effort to impress the same political columnists who predicted that FF would eventually reap rich rewards for their ‘tough choices.’
LikeLike
I agree with you WBS “Here’s a small tale..”. I think a new electoral factor is at work – in the past Labour Leaders could afford to talk left before a General Election, and act right afterwards, because they did not face serious competition on their left flank.
The 2009 Local and European Results – notably, Joe Higgins becoming a member of the European Parliament, winning a 12.2% share of first preference votes – began to change that picture.
In this situation a repeat of the 1992 Labour “Spring Tide” can not be achieved so easily. In Dublin at least, we may see a drift away from Labour, to both its left and right.
In this context, here is some useful material for a comparative study of how things have evolved in Portugal :
“Somehow, we filled a space that did not exist, a political space that had not yet been recognized”
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1923
LikeLike
The Spring era Labour party did face competition from the left though: the WP and later DL. Am I correct in saying that in the election before the ‘Spring tide'(1987) the WP took a larger share of the vote in Dublin than Labour?
LikeLike
Yes in the 1985 Local Elections Labour returned just two councillors to Dublin Corporation. The WP returned five.
LikeLike
I’m not sure about ’87, but ’89 was definitely the high point for the WP, where they got 7 seats (6 in Dublin) where Labour only got two or three in the capital. Also, that was where De Rossa topped the poll in the Euros.
Still, only three years between that and the ‘Spring tide’ of 1992.
LikeLike
Intriguingly though the majority of the seats won by the WP in 89 survived as DL and the single WP seat in 92. Even in the face of the Labour onslaught.
LikeLike
Do people not detect something more, though? I think that parties which seek office (whether as the sole, major or minority party) are very, very reulctant to say anything which invites a monstering from the commentariat, a commentariat which is very skewed to the economic right. Partly because free-markets-are-good has been the orthodoxy for a couple of decades, but partly too because they certainly have been good for the more affluent classes – who can be expected to continue doing well even in a prolonged economic crisis. I wonder whether one consequence of rising economic inequality may be that the better-off share fewer and fewer of the experiences and perceptions of the worse-off until their actual awareness of the worse-off all but disappears.
LikeLike
Martin has actually given a textbook example of the old Fianna Fail routine of trying to cover all bases simultaneously.
So you had (A) Appealing to the hardcore FF follower who needs his confidence bolstered by looking for those debates with Kenny. It’s a kind of ‘come on ye cowards ye’ number.
(B) Appealing to Labour and Sinn Fein inclined voters with that guff in the speech about republicanism and his working class roots.
(C) Appealing to those on the right by striking a statesmanlike pose in relation to supporting FG as they take ‘tough decisions.’
B is completely incompatible with C but that’s the way FF works. As anyone who’s ever had a political conversation with a party member can tell you, they are always willing to let a Labour voter know that Labour are their second favourite party and ditto with the other parties.
Interesting to see Conor’s take on Labour’s election strategy. He is one of the most reliable of observers so I believe him. But what always gets me about these political masterplans is the fact that they are so transparent. Do Labour really think middle class voters are that easily duped? The party suffered at the last election because of the tendency to hedge its bets and approach the campaign like a football team dropping back in defence to hold on to a one goal lead. It may do so again.
He’s also right in pointing out that it’s daft to conflate the working class with the ‘inner cities.’ Any rural town is full of guys who were employed in the building industry, as labourers or tradesmen. They are bearing the brunt of the downturn and seething with anger at the bail-outs. It strikes me that there is plenty of fertile territory there for a left wing party without going looking for the votes of small businessmen who wouldn’t vote Labour in a fit.
By the way, kudos to the ULA for enlisting Bertie to give a boost to Joan Collins’s election campaign. He truly is the gift that keeps on giving.
LikeLike
@ Eamonn Cork
“Do Labour really think middle class voters are that easily duped? ”
Oh I agree.
In 2009 there were around 360,000 public sector workers in the State – that was about 18 per cent of the workforce.
Around 220,00 of those public sector employees work in middle class occupations – managerial, professional, associate professional.
However, although that’s about 12 per cent of the national workforce, it’s about 30 per cent of all middle class occupations in the state.
Labour’s strategy seems to be this: we need to capture the middle class vote, and in order to do that we are going to write off at least 30 per cent of that class and blame them for the crisis, call them wasters, inefficient, etc, etc,etc.
If there’s a swing middle class vote, it’s probably in the public sector middle class, but Labour seem blissfully unaware of this, dismissing that demographic as over-50s and irrelevant.
LikeLike
It’s not even over 50s. That’s the amazing thing. And they have to know that.
LikeLike
Hello sonofstan – Yes Labour faced competition from both the Democratic left and the Workers’ Party in 1992 – also the WP outpolled Labour in Dublin in the 1987 and 1989 General Elections.
However let me explain a little my shorthand “serious competition”.
I mean by that a left which is against coalition government with the right on principle, and which gets a significant share of the first preference vote. In 1992 the Democratic Left was a left rival of the Labour Party, but was not against coalition with the right. In 1994 Proinsias de Rossa led this party into coalition with Fine Gael and Labour, becoming Minister for Social Welfare.
In the 1980’s the Workers’ Party was situated to the left of the Labour Party on most issues – certainly more so than the Democratic Left in 1990’s – but did not have a clear anti-coalition line.
In the 1981-82 period – when three governments were formed inside 18 months – rhe WP offered external support to 2 minority right-wing governments. That was very similar to the line taken by Tony Gregory, in my opinion a serious mistake. All the details are in the excellent history of the Workers’ Party written by Brian Hanly and Scott Millar – it is a history which the left today should learn from, and avoid making the same mistake.
LikeLike
Thanks Tomas – I’ve read the Lost Revolution – I understood it was a requirement before being allowed comment here? 🙂
LikeLike
Sort of like the SP ‘exam’…..
LikeLike
There was, and for all I know is, a sort of WP exam too…
LikeLike
I wonder is there one for FF?
‘Does a member of your family own a pub?’
‘Are you local?’
‘How local, exactly?’
LikeLike
For Labour, one of the frustrating things they may experience is that even if they returned to the Dail as the largest party, should they enter coalition with Fine Gael, they will find themselves behaving as though they were a minority partner in government. Fianna Fail will lend their support to Fine Gael at crucial times over the coming years, partly because they know that it is a damn good way to bring down the future government.
LikeLike
The greater proportion of the upper middle class supports Labour, and the Labour party leadership seems also drawn from this stratum, so its not surprising if Labour represents the material interests of this section, rather than the much larger working class.
LikeLike
One of the features of the Irish political scene, and concomitant on the electoral system, as I suggested above, is the importance of local knowledge, both because of the clientism implicit in the relationship between politicians and the voters, and because of the relatively small number of votes needed to change the destination of a Daíl seat. Local knowledge that is sacrificed at great cost.
I read an interesting piece over the winter, the author and source of which I can’t remember, but I think it was linked here, so one of you might remember, that suggested that Thatcher’s revolutionary achievement was the destruction of the British political party as anything more than a cohort of volunteers for the leadership. She imposed a top down structure on the Tories, with policy decisively emanating from central office, rather than conference. A model imitated enthusiastically by Labour and the Lib Dems in turn. It used to be that you needed a party on the ground to communicate a message, to pick candidates and to run the electoral machinery – these days, with the growth of the media and the atomisation of social life, this can be as easily achieved from Central Office, with troublesome and demanding amateurs getting in the way. You can see this in the increasing professionalisation of the party ranks in Parliament – all of the party leaders in the UK started their careers in policy formation for their respective party at Westminster, not in constituency work or political activism.
I would suggest that Labour here thinks the same way: it is run by people for whom ‘social media’ is shorthand for society itself, who, as ejh and Eamon suggest, don’t know or understand life outside a middle-class bubble. As I said above, mistaking such a narrow class interest for the public interest generally can work in UK elections because elections are won and lost in the South of England, among voters who are much the same sort of people as those ‘marketing’ the political parties.
It hasn’t a chance of working here.
LikeLike
it is run by people for whom ‘social media’ is shorthand for society itself, who, as ejh and Eamon suggest, don’t know or understand life outside a middle-class bubble.
Ah, that’s not my suggestion, though it may very well be true. My suggestion is that the people who actually get to do political and economic commentary come from, and live in, circumstances which are overwhelmingly (and increasingly) divorced from the conditions in which many of their fellow-citizens live, and which are moreover circumstances in which free-market, anti-public sector economics make a lot of sense. If you offend these people, whose views are much the same as those which are predominant in the financial markets, you get slaughtered.
LikeLike
That’s been very very notable in the last decade and a half in Ireland. It’s a near seamless continuity between one world, the media, and the other, the political and a third – the economic.
LikeLike
“The Left would insist on an immediate repudiation of the vassals’ charter imposed by the IMF/EU Commission which, if continued with, will turn Irish workers into serfs permanently transfusing their economic life blood into the vaults of the world’s financial markets and leave a trail of social wreckage across the Irish landscape. The Left would also insist on not a cent being paid to the financial speculators who gambled and lost on the crazed casino that was Ireland’s property market.”-Joe Higgins.
http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/4704
Comments such as this must be galling to a party which bears the name ‘Labour’, and purports to be the party of James Connolly; hence the vituperation of Joan Burton. But such attacks could backfire.
Sinn Fein is probably the bigger threat to ‘respectable society’. The Sindo should be interesting tomorrow. Will Adams accept Martin’s challenge of a one-on-one debate?
LikeLike
I wonder was this poll taken before or after people saw their payslips this month…and are those right-of-centre independents getting a bounce because of the media attention? 😉
LikeLike
The two polls tomorrow are very close to each other, which gives them a certain credibility.
Party / MB / Red C
FG / 34 / 33
Lab / 24 / 21
FF / 16 / 16
SF / 10 / 13
Gre / 2 / 1
Oth / 15 /15
Things of note:
No bounce for FF. Greens well under the margin of error. Labour edging slowly down. SF falling back but still at a historically high level. Others gaining rapidly – although what that last one represents is very much open to interpretation.
LikeLike
Ridiculously, the RedC preferred Taoiseach question produced Martin 31%, Gilmore 26%, Enda 19%
LikeLike
So people what Martin but only if he doesn’t bring his friends? Sounds like he should run for the Presidency.
LikeLike
‘what’ should be ‘want’*
LikeLike
One aspect of the whole Labour-abandoning-the-PS-vote theory just doesnt ring true to me.
I have the sense that much of the traditional PS vote for FF was essentially clientelist. Not in the individualistic passport-arranging or medical-card-procuring variety, but more in the aggregate we-have-your-back sense that CMcC alluded to.
Now the whole point of clientelism is that the patron is either directly in power or very close to the exercise of power wielding considerable influence, thus allowing the client to reap tangible or perceived benefits in return for their support. I mean, the Tammany Hall system would have fallen apart pretty quickly if the Democrats didnt retain near complete control of the city administration for decades.
Hence a protest vote for a party with no hope of being anywhere near the levers of power makes absolutely no sense for such a voter. And for that reason I really cant see that element of the PS deserting FF for SF in droves, as the Shinners dont have a realistic hope of joining a Southern coalition for at least another electoral cycle, most probably two or more.
So where are those voters gonna go? I feel that Labour is assuming, not entirely incorrectly in my view, that closer to election day a large number of them will calculate that its better be inside the tent and at least weighing in with the balance between Labour and FG (which to some extent determine how PS-unfriendly the next administration will be, whether for example the Croke Park deal holds and PS retirees continue to be relatively sheltered).
LikeLike
In my Public Sector office this lunchtime (we work on Saturdays) we had the ‘how to vote?’ discussion. The colleague who hordes payslips produced them: 8 consecutive drops in the bottom line, about 20% cumulatively – noone voting FF or Green again. FG will be even harder on the PS because of ideology and their belief that we won’t vote for them anyway – no votes for them. Labour will support FG and are already making noises about ‘public sector reform’ (cuts) and the Croke Park Deal (conditions). No votes for them. Sinn Féin? No way – we’re middle class.
So who remains? The most popular answer was to vote for the guy you know, not because he got you a medical card or fixed the footpath, but because he’s a good guy. A torrent of abuse about the Greens came from a woman who ended by admitting she’d vote for Gogarty again, faute de mieux.
Clarity? No, but some insight into why there are so many undecideds, such an appetite for independents – and why I’ve backed FF with Paddy Power to get 40 seats.
LikeLike
God, that’s depressing. So even after everything else there’s still a residual support for FF. It makes you wonder what a party would have to do in this state to actually go under.
Clearly almost nothing would do the trick.
LikeLike
For ‘hordes’ read ‘hoards’, of course.
LikeLike
Was that 40 or more, rather than the 41-45 bet? What odds did you get?
LikeLike