In American football they have a saying about a successful play: “Just like we drew it up”. Football, as the Americans play it, is much more like chess than it is anything else. The game is divided into a series of set-pieces, with each “play” a carefully pre-planned arrangement of players moving in perfect synchronicity. One receiver runs deep, another runs across the field, a third might stay close to the quarterback. The defenders can only guess at what might be coming and assign their “pieces” in the hope of disrupting whatever the offense might try to do.
To win a game, a team must execute dozens of “plays” successfully. That requires each player to know exactly what his job is on maybe hundreds of different variations in a “playbook”, and to learn deep and varied terminology that might be called out – in code – in a huddle. The plays selected by the coaching staff each week before the game, cumulatively, are referred to as “the game plan”.
Fine Gael had, very much, a “game plan” for this Irish general election. They entered it with a clear lead in the opinion polls, and with their party leader by some distance the most popular in the country. The economy is doing well. They had just splurged several billion of the public’s own euros on what amounted to an election bribe budget. The main opposition party, Sinn Fein, was in disarray.
The plan was simple: Keep the campaign short, and boring, and focused on their leader. Simon Harris’s face would be on the posters. The slogan – a new energy – was clearly referring to their leader, not to the Government that they have been part of, continuously, for 13 years. Their manifesto contained precisely one eye-catching policy idea, and that idea was to give free money to newborn children in the hope of bribing parents and grandparents-to-be. The rest of it might be summed up as “safety first”.
Two weeks into the campaign, and with four days – including today – to go before the public votes, the weaknesses of that strategy have been laid bare. The party has collapsed by an average of 5% in two opinion polls. That five per cent might equate to more than a dozen seats.
The first weakness in the strategy was, I’d venture, not understanding the difference between popularity and resignation. Fine Gael might have been the most popular party, and Simon Harris the most popular leader, but there’s a difference between relative popularity and absolute popularity. Voters might have been resigned to more Fine Gael, but they were not hungry for more Fine Gael. Every poll had shown the Government to be unpopular, but the alternatives to the Government not particularly appealing. There was always the risk that voters who didn’t really want to vote for the party anyway might find themselves better options.
The second weakness flows from that: The party has ignored its own strengths and decided on auction politics, meaning that there is little to no contrast between Fine Gael and its competitors. How different might the polls look if Fine Gael had said something like this instead: “We have managed the economy to a position of strength and we are not going to be irresponsible now – the country can’t risk the spending splurges of Fianna Fáil and Sinn Fein or we will end up in a mess”.
That would have had two advantages – first that it would have highlighted Fine Gael’s one strength – its record on the public finances – and second that it might just have created a real contrast between the party and its opponents.
The third weakness, frankly, has been the performance of Simon Harris. Hundreds of thousands of column inches have by now been devoted to his awful moment in Kanturk last Friday. But even before this, we have not seen the confident Simon Harris of the 2018 abortion referendum, which he turned into (depending on your views) a(n) (im)moral crusade. We have seen an oddly halting, nervous, occasionally ratty Taoiseach who has done little to improve his personal likeability. At the Fine Gael manifesto launch a week ago, I thought we saw him at his most commanding – but there have been few such performances in the public eye.
The fourth weakness has been the bizarre decision to put the Minister for Justice front and centre, with her face on Fine Gael billboards across the land. You can see how that happened: Some NGO-whisperer in the party got their way at a strategy meeting, insisting that “we need a woman front and centre”. They just forgot that this particular woman is not one whose record is viewed entirely fondly by the electorate.
And the fifth weakness has been a lack of ambition: The party has gone heavy on spending money, but immensely light on reform. There is no equivalent, for example, to Enda Kenny’s 2007 “contract for a better Ireland”, which at least put policy reforms front and centre. Ambition to change the health service has disappeared entirely. Abolishing the USC has been dumped. The entire message to an electorate that wants change has been “vote Fine Gael for more of the same”.
This, of course, contrasts deeply with “A new energy”.
A new energy for what, exactly?
It should not be surprising, then, that the electorate – if you are to believe yesterday’s polls – has turned away from the Fine Gael campaign and is now seeking out alternatives. Say what you want about Aontu’s “Operation Shamrock” idea to bring Irish workers home from overseas, but at least you can see a vision in it. A direction that they want to set for the country. They are rising in the polls, and Fine Gael is fading.
All of this is evidence of a bad game plan. The party, frankly, entered this election taking the voters and the result for granted. They’ll deny it – but they did.
The result is a glum Taoiseach, going through the motions, wondering if the damage can be reversed in a few days. Perhaps it can. But what’s gone wrong here has been entirely the party’s own fault.