Ireland’s liberal center hides something darker

As Europe pushes to the margins – incumbent governments are losing voters at an unprecedented rate and Britain’s Conservatives are pushing to the right to neutralize the reform effect – Ireland is entrenching itself in the middle. The country will hold its first general election since 2020 on November 29, and all signs point to the continued dominance of Ireland’s liberal centrist establishment.

Since the state’s founding in 1922, only Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil – which form the current governing coalition – have ever found enough support in the Irish Parliament to appoint a Taoiseach, despite the multi-party state. Even Sinn Féin, a party that grew out of Ireland’s irredentist national movement and once represented an alternative to the status quo, is courting voters in the middle. Ireland’s mainstream political culture is homogeneous, centrist and conformist, while its fringes remain fragmented. The general election will not stress test this agreement; Ireland is likely to continue – as it did in local and European elections this summer – to fend off the populism that has collapsed across much of Europe this year. But this superficial stability lulls the nation into a false sense of security: the gap between the government and its voters is widening.

Dublin is one of Europe’s richest cities, largely thanks to low corporate tax rates that entice foreign multinational tech companies such as Amazon, TikTok and Meta to use it as a European base. The government is running a budget surplus and during the election campaign all parties promised to ease the cost of living crisis.

But this economic growth has also led to a destabilizing population boom, caused in part by the admission of 100,000 Ukrainian refugees and 26,000 other asylum seekers. In the shadow of the Grand Canal Dock – Ireland’s Silicon Valley – authorities often have to clear rows and rows of young asylum seekers camping in tents. Ireland’s biggest export was once its emigrants. Today almost a fifth of the population is born abroad. These two versions of the nation — one with incredible wealth and dilapidated public services, with tech giants and housing crises, with enormous population growth and few plans to exploit it — were destined to come into conflict.

On the evening of November 23, 2023, Dublin was set on fire by rioters. Earlier that day, an Algerian-born naturalized citizen attacked three elementary school children and a teacher with a knife. A real estate crisis and steep demographic change had led to anti-immigrant sentiment spreading to the outskirts. In the months before the riots, the city’s eastern wall had been the scene of anti-immigrant marches, and in 2019 a hotel intended for asylum seekers in County Leitrim was set on fire twice.

Despite growing unrest, the Bien penant The center of Irish politics tends to avoid the issue of immigration. But the issue has fractured Sinn Féin’s electoral coalition.

Sinn Féin formed from the remnants of an old party as the political wing of the IRA. Its leader, Mary Lou McDonald, was hand-picked by Gerry Adams – the former IRA commander and Sinn Féin leader – to lead the party from the republican fringe into mainstream respectability. The privately educated woman from leafy Dublin was perfect for the job, a marked change from the harsh and violent men of the party’s traditional leadership. She presided over Sinn Féin’s most successful election in the Republic in 2020, forcing Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to abandon the enmity born of the civil war and form a coalition. Just a year ago she was considered Taoiseach-in-waiting.

Young voters flocked to Sinn Féin’s new mix of left-wing populism and social liberalism (the party largely supported the legalization of abortion in the 2018 referendum). But by seeking this vote, Sinn Féin tied a Gordian knot. On one side of their base are urban liberals who are concerned about social justice and housing. On the other hand, the party’s traditional voter: not interested in progressive politics, but driven by Republican aspirations and fear of increasing immigration.

It is not easy for a party to simultaneously portray itself as a liberal dove of open borders and a nationalist immigration hawk. At one of many anti-immigration marches in Dublin in recent months, participants branded Sinn Féin “traitors” for abandoning their former principles in the pursuit of power. The McDonald’s party looks exactly like the establishment it claims to loathe, without ever having had the chance to govern.

The differences between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are small but not invisible. The former – the party of Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s youngest and first openly gay Taoiseach – is more socially liberal than its counterpart (during the 2018 abortion referendum, a majority of Fine Gael TDs or MPs supported the liberalization measures, while a majority of Fianna Fail TDs did). not). It describes itself as a party of entrepreneurship, compared to Fianna Fail’s skepticism towards big business and technology. Fine Gael grew out of Dublin’s commercial classes and private schools and is considered a natural home for doctors and lawyers. Fianna Fail’s roots lie more radically in the lower middle class.

At the front door in Fine Gael’s heartland – the affluent suburbs south of Dublin – I heard some dismay over housing construction earlier this month (though far less than in 2020, one veteran campaigner told me). The most common cost was childcare. Voters there barely mentioned immigration, in stark contrast to the disadvantaged inner cities. Parts of Dublin Central – McDonald’s constituency – are in significant disrepair. There, demonstrators marched under banners with the right-wing extremist clarion call “Ireland is full”. The area’s Parnell Square was the scene of the knife attack last November. Here voters were apathetic: they were fed up with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil’s domineering attitude; disillusioned with McDonald’s progressive turn.

Dublin is a wealthy city with a run-down center and an elite that dare not talk about immigration while residents riot over the issue of planned asylum centers. It is the capital of a country that struggled to escape forced loyalty to the United Kingdom, only to willingly pay allegiance to Silicon Valley. In 1939, Louis MacNeice wrote of Dublin’s “shabby elegance”, its “glamor and squalor”. Today, Ireland has never been more marked by its contradictions.

Despite this incoherence, the liberal center will persevere. The system – while pushing fringe politics into the middle – dictates that this is how it must be. But behind this lies a deeper unrest in the electorate, a restlessness that will continue to seek the political expression it cannot find in the mainstream.

(See also: “Your body, my choice”: a chilling slogan from the Trumpian alt-right)