Mick Clifford: 'Reluctant election' shows off two sides of Ireland's anti-establishment sentiment
Catherine Connolly deserves major credit. Few gave her a realistic chance when she threw her hat in the ring ahead of all other candidates. File photo: Sasko Lazarov / © RollingNews.ie
This is the reluctant election. The contest to become the next president of the country has been one full of departures, non-entry, doubts and questions.
Bar some earth-shattering development, Catherine Connolly will be elected next weekend. If ever there was an election to deliver a coup de grace of the unexpected this is it, but that remains highly unlikely.
The bigger question, at this stage of the game, is what does the election say about the political firmament and the country at large?
Firstly though, Ms Connolly deserves major credit. Few gave her a realistic chance when she threw her hat in the ring ahead of all other candidates.
Initially, she only had the support of the smaller parties on the left. Of those, senior figures in both Labour and the Greens publicly declared they could not back her because her politics was too far left.
Eventually, Sinn Féin came on board after reluctantly concluding that they could not win with an internal candidate who wasn’t Mary Lou McDonald, and she was not running. Their endorsement was, as McDonald declared at the time, a gamechanger.
Fine Gael did what the party does best — conducted a poor election campaign. They were robbed of their best candidate Mairead McGuinness who had to pull out for health reasons.
At that point, the party could have taken a good look at others, like MEP Sean Kelly. Instead the honchos decided with undue haste that Heather Humphreys was the way to go.
Ms Humphreys' candidacy was a blast from the past. She had retired from politics, and was now running for an office that had once been a retirement home for politicians.
Her public persona exudes warmth and competence, but that’s not enough to be president. And then to really put the kibosh in the Fine Gael campaign, Ivan Yates stepped forward with instructions to his former party to smear and smear widely, morning, noon and night.
Connolly’s campaign could not have asked for a more telling intervention.
Micheál Martin made an error with his party’s candidate, Jim Gavin. On paper Gavin had much going for him. Once out on the pitch he appeared to possess two left feet. If his past with an out-of-pocket tenant hadn’t reared up he might have gone on to act as sweeper to Humphreys, gifting her transfers to put her over the line.
None of that was to be. Now, barring that referenced earthquake, Catherine Connolly will be Ireland’s tenth president. She is way to the left of the electorate in general but is astute and imbued with the kind of resilience that comes with experience in politics.
It will be entirely up to her how she handles the office, whether she can leave behind her instinctive anti-EU, anti-American politics and conduct herself as a tribune of the people at large rather than a representative of a small far-left cohort.
In different hands controversies like her trip to Syria, the employment of a woman convicted of offences related to potential political violence, comparing Germany to the Nazis and viewing the EU repeatedly as representing something called “the military industrial complex” would have been fatal.
In another election, with more or better rivals, that kind of stuff would still have caused her major problems. But the brave make their own luck and she had the courage to put her name forward when her candidacy represented a long shot.
Where she really succeeded was in conveying authenticity. When faced with awkward questions, she didn’t apologise but doubled down. This is who I am, she said, not who I am supposed to project myself as in order to maximise appeal across an aggregate of voters.
That authenticity, or at least the appearance of it, represents the zeitgeist in politics right now. Donald Trump has it. So have most of the anti-establishment strongmen (and Georgia Meloni) who have come to the fore in recent years, usually through the vehicle of right-wing populism.
What this presidential election has highlighted is that unlike in other countries the anti-establishment sentiment here can be found in not inconsiderable numbers at both ends of the political spectrum.
Connolly represents the left cohort. On the right, the figure of Maria Steen emerged. Her failure to get nominated for the election was down to poor campaigning, not least the candidate’s late entry into the race.
Her supporters have attempted to project the failure as some “anti-democratic” blocking by the main parties. Their reaction is straight out of the MAGA playbook, screaming of entitlement and grievance.
They demanded a nomination process that would have been tailormade to suit their candidate’s wants and needs. And when things didn’t turn out as they wanted they attempted to undermine a democratic election, calling for votes to be spoiled.
If Steen had shown even a modicum of Connolly’s nous and resilience she would have made it to the starting blocks. And thereafter the bookies would have had short odds on her winning.
To that extent, the election has highlighted the dual nature of the anti-establishment sentiment out there. On the left Connolly’s expected victory will be hailed as presenting a compass towards an 'Anybody But Fianna Fail-Fine Gael' government.
This new dawn includes the caveat that all those claiming to be left and anti-establishment will coalesce with Fianna Fáil in particular if post-election arithmetic so dictates. The only exception to this is People Before Profit, the outfit that probably most closely echoes Connolly’s politics.
On the right, the broad religious, ethno-nationalist cohort has now finally identified a potential figurehead who could lead them towards the promised land of electoral inroads. Maria Steen, even in her fleeting public appearances, slipped neatly into the template that has succeeded abroad.
She is articulate, intelligent, photogenic and apparently wealthy, all front of house elements for the political personas of the relatively new brand of leaders surfing the zeitgeist.
What she hasn’t shown is any real interest in executive politics. It’s one thing to rush forward at a late hour and declare you’d like to be president. The hard slog of building a party or movement and attempting to attract voters is a completely different ballgame.
To that extent, the anti-establishment cohort gathering on the right appear to be condemned to wandering the desert, while their kindred spirits on the left will at least have a figurehead in the Aras.
That is of course barring fate’s greasy hand intervening with some form of a political earthquake in the next seven days. Should she do it as now expected, Ms Connolly and her team can congratulate themselves on an unlikely victory.
The smart money says she will turn out to be an interesting bunch of presidents.
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