“Poll shock for “toxic” Greens”, reads Hugh O’Connell’s headline in the Sunday Independent, as that newspaper’s latest opinion poll shows Eamon Ryan and the gang on three per cent of public support, and on course to lose all of their seats at the next general election, whenever that may be. Worse than the headline support figure is that almost half of all voters say that they will leave the Green Party off their ballot entirely – not even an eighth or ninth preference vote.
It is this transfer toxicity, in the end, that will kill them far more than the low share of first preference votes. The Greens have traditionally been a transfer friendly party – the first choice of few people, but an inoffensive option to mark down at four or five on the ballot paper. This transfer friendliness has won them many seats over the years, and if it is reversed, then total wipeout becomes a very real possibility. But this is not a poll that you should cheer, if you are someone who likes the idea of the Greens being wiped out because you oppose their policies.
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The basic idea of democracy is a good one, because it is based on incentives: As it is supposed to work, voters are incentivised to choose leaders who will act in their best interests and to keep in office those who are doing a good job. Politicians, meanwhile, are incentivised to be responsive to the public, and to lead the country in a direction which has the broad support of a majority of electors. The problem is that if either of these incentives stop working, the system breaks down.
The other problem is that it is a system which basically relies on the voters not electing zealots who do not care about staying in office.
For democracy to work, politicians have to have egos, and a desire to be liked. They have to fear losing elections. When they stop fearing the loss of an election, there is no longer any real mechanism for accountability.
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I write all the above because it illustrates the problem with the Greens: They are genuinely unlike other parties. When they say that, about themselves, they are telling the truth. This is because the Green Party is not a national movement, but an international one: Their loyalty is not to the country but to the planet. Irish National interests are meaningless to them, because, as they see it, without a planet there will be no Ireland anyway.
What this means in practice is that though they may make occasional nods towards the concerns of Irish voters in order to achieve power, they have no interest in the concerns of Irish voters once they take power. They are not there to serve you – they are there to stop you destroying the planet. That is their mission, and they are open about it.
The problem for the rest of us, and democracy as a system of Government, is that this makes the Greens ideologically impervious to the kind of concerns that other, more traditional politicians might have. A Government on course for an electoral wipeout might decide, in the normal course, to change policies to try and win re-election. We see this all the time: Joe Biden, for example, has recently started pretending to get very concerned about the US border. Donald Trump, having borrowed trillions of dollars in his first term as President, is now pretending to be very concerned about the US National Debt. Politicians usually tailor their policies to the concerns of the voters, even if they’re not very credible in doing so.
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The difficulty with the Greens is that they cannot by definition tailor their policies to the concerns of the voters, because their very rationale for existing is to over-ride and repress the concerns of the voters. If you like your car, then that’s too bad: The whole point of the Green Party is to take it off you. They might try and make you feel better about it, but there’s simply no way they are ever going to change their mind on the topic.
And so, faced with electoral oblivion, the response of the Green Party will not be to moderate or modulate or change their policies: It will be to do more harm to you, faster, and to change as much as possible about your life before you kick them out of office. Then they’re perfectly happy to wait a decade until you’ve forgotten what they did last time, and try the whole thing again.
If they think culling 200,000 cattle will get them kicked out of office, then don’t expect them to say “we’d better not do that”. Expect them to decide to try and cull 500,000 cattle instead, on the basis that they might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Hide your cows.
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What the poll showing the Greens on course for oblivion should do, though, is to empower their opponents within the Government. The Greens have very little political leverage at the moment: There are, if the Government needs them, plenty of rural independents who would presumably be quite happy to take a deal keeping the Government in office in return for putting an end to the cattle cull and various other Green policies that are deeply unpopular in rural areas. The Greens are much more likely to be forced to moderate at the prospect of losing power now, rather than the prospect of losing it in a few years.
Kicking them out of Government would, in fact, be about the most popular thing that many rural Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael TDs could do, or be seen to do. Those TDs, unlike the Greens, presumably do care about holding their seats.
But then, if FF and FG backbenchers customarily did what the public wanted them to do, they wouldn’t be in a position where their Government is at the mercy of Eamon Ryan in the first place.