Kenny can go to Brussels or set out clear objectives for government

THERE are some things you can say for sure about Enda Kenny. He is a survivor, as tough as nails and not nearly as happy-go-lucky as he wants you to think. Part-actor, part-chameleon, part-huckster and dealer, and if we are lucky part-prodigy as well.

We are shortly going to find out what the real Enda is made of. For our sakes I hope we are not disappointed. The thing about successful politicians is you never really know who or what they are. Their art is to keep you guessing, to allow them stay in the game.

Kenny has had a bad few months politically. But he is still the man with potentially more to play for than anyone else. Now it’s do-or-die time for him. He may be beset by problems. But he also has the means to make a transformative change, if he chooses.

Kenny came to power the long way around. He is a Fine Gael TD long enough to remember the tide going out for Liam Cosgrave in 1977; for Garret FitzGerald in 1987; and John Bruton in 1997. He knows the tide is going out again. He has two choices for certain, and perhaps a third if he is lucky.

The third choice, the one in doubt, is the one he claims no interest in — Europe. By coincidence the month between now and the election of a new Labour leader may bring some clarity on who is in the running for what in Brussels. The former Luxembourg prime minster Jean-Claude Juncker’s candidacy to replace Jose Manuel Barroso as president of the Commission is faltering. His claim to that post is based on his nomination by the European People’s Party, the Christian Democrat alliance. Coincidentally, Enda Kenny hosted the conference in Dublin where Juncker was nominated, and backs him.

Kenny may well regret not taking the chance if it comes. Any offer is as likely to be for Herman Van Rumpuy, the president of the council job, as Barroso. Kenny has in the past demonstrated a skillset matching the savvy needed to chair a council of 28 states. In taking a major post, he would be doing the State some service. He won’t be out there batting for Ireland, but he can sensitise the atmosphere in key conversations. The alternative is we are bereft of a rare chance of a key EU post and he must face his hardest political challenge ever.

By and large I am an admirer of Kenny as Taoiseach. He did what needed doing economically, and the messes so far have been about political management, or a lack of it. But then I am economically right of centre, a strong supporter of the programme of fiscal adjustment which the EU Commission said on Monday, it is imperative to continue on. Yesterday Prof John McHale, who heads the government’s Fiscal Advisory Council, said the same. However, that’s a political taste that increasing swathes of the electorate are losing any appetite for. In McHale’s words “the politics have turned against it“.

And here is the nub of Kenny’s choice. He can try to manage events, or he can challenge the developing narrative and be transformative. If he deserves kudos for economic progress over the past three years, he cannot claim to have been the man with the plan. The economic plan was his predecessors. The one plan he did have, for a democratic revolution, was abandoned, and is now seldom spoken of at all by government.

From the day he was elected until December 15 last, Kenny had a narrative set in the future tense, of present policy leading to future achievement. The fatal mistake on that day was the gear shift back into the present tense — always a quagmire when you are in power. Once you are defined by current expectations you cannot deliver, and have lost the narrative of a promised but still-unarrived-at land, the steel trap of public disappointment snaps shut.

To be successful, politics, like religion, must always be forward-looking; faced towards the horizon. There must always be a credible promise of what is yet to be attained.

Kenny’s choice is whether he traps himself in the narrative set for him by his opponents outside government, and his anxious Labour competitors within it, or becomes a game changer. The nonsense about austerity not working, about having to ease off, is creeping like poison ivy around the national conversation. The fact is that slowly but surely people are going back to work. Property taxes and water charges are a positive public good, absolutely necessary to rebalance an out-of-kilter tax system. They are also revenue for services that those most opposed, hypocritically berate a lack of funding for, out of the other side of their mouths.

Kenny’s legacy is appreciable thus far, but not original. Swimming in the slipstream of a retreating tide now, will only leave him stranded eventually. His alternative, the one he was elected on and can still muster a significant portion of voters for, is the core message of fiscal prudence, of reducing the budget deficit further come what may, and making a virtue of further reductions in public spending. This will be unpopular and politically difficult. It is also a policy that if clearly articulated and led with conviction can muster not only a depleted Fine Gael vote of 24% but significantly perhaps some of the vote he has lost.

SINN FÉIN and most of the independents are adamantly, and Fianna Fáil effectively opposed, to the economic policies originated by the previous government and continued thus far by this one. Labour will re-emerge on July 4 with a new leader, demanding a new approach. Kenny as Taoiseach can manage the backsliding for a time, but only at a cost of ending in a no-man’s land, surrounded on all sides, and with no credibly defensible position left. It is then, if they can, that his former TDs in the Reform Alliance, like the PDs before, will be poised to offer an alternative to his already depleted core voter base.

The alternative is to set out clear objectives, and lead a reshuffled, re-energised team in government for as long as he can, towards their fulfilment. The ultimate aim must not be office at the price of power, but of using power while the reality remains, for a purpose. Garret FitzGerald fatally compromised on his economic objectives, allowed the PDs space to emerge and saw Fine Gael out of government almost continuously for a generation. Kenny can go to Brussels or he can go for broke. A discreet epiphany during his time in office was a viewing of an exhibition of flower paintings by his former constituency colleague Pee Flynn. The appalling vista, of a similar garden of delights, should spur him on not to fail.