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Sinn Féin, the former political wing of the IRA, is hoping to stage a last-minute revival in the Irish general election after polls put it ahead of the party led by the taoiseach, Simon Harris.
Ahead of Friday’s election, the party leader, Mary Lou McDonald, has said she sees a path to victory, after polls this week showed Harris’s centre-right Fine Gael dropping from first to third place and the progressive, populist, leftwing Sinn Féin moving into second behind Fine Gael’s government coalition partner, Fianna Fáil.
“It’s now very clear that there can be government beyond Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, that for the first time we can have a government led by Sinn Féin,” said McDonald this week.
The confident tone marks a mood change for Sinn Féin, which entered the three-week election campaign battered and bruised by a disastrous set of local election results in the summer, where it picked up just 12% of first preference votes, confounding expectations of a landslide.
The party is keen to capitalise on the missteps that have characterised the usually popular Harris’s campaign, dominated in recent days by an angry encounter with a care worker.
However, analysts said the newfound optimism was unlikely to yield a breakthrough. “They have come into their own on the campaign. Mary Lou McDonald has performed well in both TV debates,” said Gail McElroy, professor of political science at Trinity College Dublin.
But the party would only do well at the expense of other leftwing candidates and parties, she said. And McDonald – who succeeded Gerry Adams as Sinn Féin president in 2018, becoming the leftist party’s first leader not connected to Northern Ireland’s Troubles – was very unlikely to become Ireland’s first female taoiseach, for now at least.
In 2020, when there was last a general election, Sinn Féin won the most first preference votes, albeit placing second in terms of seats won. In the years that followed, polls showed the party soaring to about 35% of the vote, which appeared to put it within touching distance of progressing its 100-year goal of a united Ireland.
But its popularity has since plunged over unclear immigration policies, the housing crisis and a string of scandals. Support for unification has stalled. Now, the party finds itself on about 20% of the vote, according to an Irish Times/Ipsos B&A poll released on Monday.
About 88 seats are needed to form a majority and, with no party expected to get more than 40 seats, another coalition appears inevitable. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have both ruled out forming a coalition with Sinn Féin, making McDonald’s vow to form a government highly unlikely to be fulfilled.
Central to the challenges Sinn Féin faces is the tension between the political forces within the party, McElroy said.
Unlike many nationalist parties in the rest of the EU – such as the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and the National Rally in France – socialist ideology is at Sinn Féin’s core.
“Migration is a really difficult issue for them. Sinn Féin are unusual in that they are a leftwing nationalist party,” she said.
“Typically, nationalist parties tend to be on the right and nativist … happy to redistribute money but only to people of a given nationality. Sinn Féin, on the other hand, have quite a socialist economic agenda, which is at odds with that. They are also reasonably liberal in the republic which creates a tension in the party,” she added.
Those tensions have been particularly exposed this year with a significant rise in the number of people coming to Ireland from the Middle East and elsewhere, requesting asylum. An estimated 16,000 people have lodged such claims this year, compared with approximately 9,000 in 2023.
Small far-right parties have so far failed to make a political breakthrough but are more noticeable than ever. Several independent candidates are running on anti-immigration tickets in next week’s election.
“You have all these independents who can espouse whatever views are popular on the ground in areas where there are asylum seekers or hostels are going to be established. Sinn Féin have had to lean to the right on this,” adds McElroy.
Richard Colwell, founder of polling company Red C, said Sinn Féin’s historic popularity had been based on shaky ground.
“If you look at 2020, it was a kind of flaky support. The gains Sinn Féin made were very much based on ‘anyone but Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil’. It was an anti-establishment vote that crystallised around Sinn Féin. But the problem was, if you dug in beneath those views, people didn’t actually have the same policy views or attitudes as Sinn Féin at all,” said Colwell.
In the well-heeled Phibsboro in McDonald’s Dublin Central constituency, Aaron, who voted Sinn Féin in the last general election and declined to give his surname, was unimpressed with the party’s tilt to the right on immigration.
“I don’t like their recent moves to populism. We need a rational conversation about immigration and a sensible discussion about the future of this country without surrendering to the bigots and the rabble-rousers that seem to have sway at the moment,” he said.
