Thirteen years after taking power, Fine Gael now look like a beaten ticket. Leo Varadkar at times looked more disinterested than exhausted, despite some emotional moments, when he announced that he was standing down as Taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael.
It also probably explains why most of his front bench colleagues appeared to have neither the appetite nor the vision to even contest the leadership of the party. The standard blaming of a ‘toxic political environment’ no longer really explains the sense of atrophy afflicting Fine Gael, a party that appears to have long since lost its way in the corridors of power of Leinster House.
The stampede for the lifeboats by the crew members (led by the captain) speaks for itself about the sorry mess that is now Fine Gael. This is not being mean spirited – everyone will have sympathy with Leo Varadkar on a personal basis. Public service at this level is invariably a tough and thankless job where you’re rarely likely to please most people even some of the time.
But Varadkar and Fine Gael have led a charmed existence in this regard. Both have had close on fifteen years in power – surely an unprecedented situation in terms of any democracy worldwide. What has made it even more so is that the Irish media have been largely sympathetic to the Fine Gael project throughout this time and have not subjected it to the type of robust scrutiny that most governments have to contend with.
Added to that, the leftist opposition led by Sinn Fein has proved to be wholly ineffective. It has basically given Fine Gael and its coalition partners a free pass to basically do whatever it wants without the nuisance of a political opposition or a hostile media.
In retrospect, the decision to enter a coalition government after the hammering it got in the 2020 general election spoke of a political party more interested in political office than in political ideals. It had all the sense of a cabal who were content to have another spin on the political merry-go-round regardless of the cost in terms of political principles.
Four years on from its inception, that Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil/Green coalition has been well and truly found out. The faulty foundations and suspect construction were always evident but the referendums on March 8th proved that this political contraption is, and always has been, entirely disconnected from the Irish electorate.
This is not to say that coalition governments, per se, always tend to be like this. There is nothing inherently wrong with two or more parties proposing a coalition and a programme for government – before an election. That way, the electorate have full democratic oversight about the makeup and programme for government of any such coalition.
But that’s not what happened in Ireland in the 2020 general election. After losing 15 seats, Leo Varadkar didn’t resign – instead, he went into coalition with the main opposition party and the Greens who, on just 7.1% of the vote could hardly be said to have swept the electoral boards.
That resulting coalition gave the Greens political power that their electoral support never merited. However, it appears to have been a price that Varadkar and Fine Gael were happy to pay in order to stay in power. The reality is that Leo Varadkar’s Fine Gael are part of a coalition that no one ever voted for implementing a programme for government that no one voted for either.
Fine Gael, over the last thirteen years, has unceremoniously dumped just about every core principle of the party’s founding fathers. Even the old style Fine Gael reputation for fiscal rectitude has taken a battering. After close on fifteen years of control over the finance portfolio, the Irish state this year will spend €110bn showing perhaps that no one does Big State these days quite like Fine Gael.
Leo Varadkar and his Fine Gael have also taken an axe to the conservative social policies that were core political principles for the same party’s founders. In particular, he has helped to make the term ‘social conservative’ a dirty word in Irish politics, something to be hurled as an insult or as a means of closing down political debate.
Of course, the bottom line in all of this is whether Ireland in 2024 is actually a better place to the one taken in hand by Fine Gael in 2011? Crises in health, housing, a breakdown in law and order and an immigration shambles would suggest that, on some metrics, it is not. In the wake of the closure of hundreds of hotels up and down the country, we now have the bizarre situation whereby the Irish state presents the greatest threat to the viability of the Irish tourism industry.
This is the simple truth that a lot of Fine Gael TDs would appear to be acting on by quitting the politics associated with Varadkar’s Fine Gael. While it may have admirers in the Irish media, there is increasing evidence that Leo Varadkar’s Ireland has gone down like a proverbial lead balloon with the Irish public.
The bad news for Simon Harris is that a large section of the Irish electorate appear to have woken up to the relentless spin and sheer ineptitude characterised by Fine Gael. Simply re-hashing a bells and whistles version of Varadkar’s Fine Gael is unlikely to work this time round.
The challenge for Harris may well be to reconnect to the Fine Gael that existed before its ascent to power in 2011. Faithfully following the Varadkar dictum of apparently holding power for nothing more than the thrill of it is unlikely to halt the party’s deathly downward spiral. Whether Simon Harris is the man to make that sort of call remains to be seen.