At first blush, this might seem an odd question, but consider the context:
POLL – Dáil Éireann
Red C / Sunday Business Post
SF: 33% (nc)
FG: 19% (-1)
FF: 16% (-1)
SD: 5% (+1)
LP: 5% (+1)
GP: 5% (nc)
PBP-S: 3% (nc)
AÚ: 2% (nc)
I/O: 11% (nc)18-23 March 2022
+/- February 2022
Margin of Error: 3%— Ireland Votes | #Vote2024 (@Ireland_Votes) March 26, 2022
In a general election, 19% would be Fine Gael’s worst ever result. In 2020, the party scored its second-worst ever result, managing just 20.7%, a result beaten only by the miserable 19.8% it scored in 1948. It is worth noting that this is not what was expected, when Leo Varadkar was elected leader.
After all, in the early part of his career, Varadkar was an enormous vote getter. As a council candidate, he won his first seat with nearly three quotas. As a Dáil candidate, he romped home at the head of the poll. When he contested the leadership with Simon Coveney, his biggest selling point was electability: That he could boost the party in the vote-rich middle class suburbs of Dublin and the Commuter belt, and that he had youth and vigour and good looks on his side.
None of that, so far, has translated to electoral success. And he remains, remember, under an absurdly long criminal investigation about leaking a contract.
Fine Gael TDs complain to anybody who will listen that the party is too metropolitan and Dublin focused, but that, in truth, is not really the problem: A party that was metropolitan and Dublin focused wouldn’t really be a problem, since most voters in this country are metropolitan and Dublin focused. No, the problem is more fundamental, which is that the party has increasingly – like Fianna Fáil – almost no sense of identity.
To the extent that it does have an identity, under Varadkar, that identity is almost an entirely negative one: It is identified with the economic right, but passively. In other words, it doesn’t actually campaign for deregulation and market economics, but gets tagged with all the negative consequences of those. In a large part of the public mind, it is the party of vulture funds and fat state contracts for friendly companies, but not the party of jobs and low taxes.
It’s easy to see what Varadkar wants Fine Gael to be: In his mind, Fine Gael is a party of the liberal, progressive, centre. It’s the party of silicon valley: High tech, LGBT friendly, contemplation spaces in the office, gender quotas in the boardroom, ethical capitalism, trans visibility, planting trees, and cycling along the docklands beside electric cars, and watching true crime documentaries on Netflix.
In other words, it’s the party of very self-consciously middle-class people who want to “build a better world” and be seen to do it. There is not really any space in the Fine Gael firmament for people outside that kind of life, or people with social problems. The impression you get – unfortunately – is of a party that simply does not understand people who cannot afford to buy a house.
Much of that is Varadkar’s fault. Not all of it, but much of it. After all, he embodies much of that perceived attitude: He is wealthy, he is young, he is privileged, he is self-consciously liberal, and he simply does not seem like somebody who has ever experienced the consequences of high fertiliser prices, or been rejected for a mortgage, or had his housing estate terrorised by a gang of feral youths.
Later this year, he is scheduled to become Taoiseach again. If he does, that probably locks him in as Fine Gael leader until the next election. And, on current trends, that probably means that several of his sitting TDs will be out of a job when that election comes. And they know it.
The criminal investigation – trumped up though it seems to this writer – probably provides them with the excuse they need if they want to move. And, unlike Fianna Fáil, the party has three or four plausible alternative leaders, from Simon Coveney, to Simon Harris, to wildcards like Heather Humphries or Helen McEntee. The latter is a particularly attractive option because – at least in the eyes of some parliamentarians – she marries Varadkar’s metropolitan appeal with a rural base of support and an understanding of the issues farmers, and so on, face. A change of leader by the end of the summer is not something a wise observer would rule out.
But of course, the leadership is only part of the problem. It will not change anything if it is not accompanied by a change in strategy: The competition for middle class educated voters around Dublin is fierce. Everybody bar Sinn Fein is in on that battle. In the meantime, Sinn Fein is being allowed almost unchallenged space to appeal to everybody else.
With every day that passes, Fine Gael TDs might be looking at Enda Kenny, and wondering why they ever let him go.