This is….. not a decision that makes a whole lot of sense, actually:
GREEN PARTY COUNCILLOR Hazel Chu has announced that she will run as an independent candidate in the upcoming Seanad by-election.
Chu, the Lord Mayor of Dublin and the Green Party’s chairperson, did not receive backing from her party to run but submitted a nomination for the Industrial and Commercial panel after securing enough nominations to appear on the ballot.
Why does it not make any sense, you ask? Well, the answer is fairly straightforward: She doesn’t have a hope of winning.
The electorate for a Seanad by-election is very small. In fact, the total number of people with votes is just 218. 160 TDs, and 58 Senators. Normally there are 60 senators, but the by-election is to fill two seats belonging to people who have resigned.
The 218 voters who will be casting ballots are not normal voters, either: They’re hugely partisan, committed politicians. One of the seats that is vacant belonged to Fine Gael. The other belonged to Sinn Fein. Neither Fine Gael nor Sinn Fein TDs and Senators are going to vote for Chu to take a seat that rightly belongs (in their mind) to their party. That’s 91 votes, straight off the bat, that she’s not going to get. Fianna Fáil have another 57 votes. She’s not going to get those either.
What will happen, most likely, is that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, with 107 votes between them (not quite a majority, but pretty close) will decide on which candidates to support, with each party picking one, and dividing the two seats between them. Chu will be left with the scrapings of the barrel – picking up a few votes from rebel Green TDs, and maybe Labour, Social Democrat, and other politicians who would like to see her in the Seanad.
And why would Labour, Social Democrat, and other lefty politicians like to see Chu in the Seanad? Two reasons, but one is more important to them than the other. The official, but unimportant reason will be that she’s a good progressive woman who would be our first Asian-Irish Senator. Voting for her is a great way to burnish one’s progressive credentials. So, she can probably expect endorsements from the likes of Ivana Bacik and Aodhán O’Riordáin in short order.
But that’s not the main reason. The main reason would be to destabilise the Greens.
Note that Chu is running as an “independent Green”, which is another way of saying that her candidacy is not endorsed by Green Party HQ. She’s a renegade candidate, at odds with her party leadership, and wholly ambiguous about her party’s participation in Government. It’s highly unlikely that the Greens could count on her as a reliable vote, if, by some miracle, she was to win.
What could they count on her for, though?
Well, she’d be a regular in the media, probably criticising the party’s every second move in Government, and emphasising the divisive, wokester issues on which she’s built her brand. That’s a toxic possibility, if you’re Eamon Ryan, who, frankly, has enough challenges on his plate as it is.
Add to that, of course, the fact that Ryan and Chu share a Dáil constituency in Dublin Bay South, and that there is little love between them. Indeed, it’s believed by many that bad blood exists between them because Ryan did not share the ticket with Chu at the last election, fearing for his own seat more than he hoped for (what some Greens thought was the possibility of) two.
In other words, voting for Chu makes perfect sense if you are a member of a rival party on the left who wants to see the Greens fight each other and self-combust.
That’s probably what Chu is banking on, too. She doesn’t have a prayer of actually winning, but if she can pull 20 or so votes on the first count, she’ll trot back to the Green activists having made Ryan look weak and vulnerable. The objective here, make no mistake, is to convince poor Eamon that the game is up, and there’s no point seeking re-election. Who, then, would be in prime position to be the candidate for the Dáil at the next election? Why, Ms. Chu, obviously.
The problem with that approach, of course, is that none of this machiavellian jiggery-pokery will save her even if she is the Green candidate at the next election. The Greens are on course to be absolutely toxic by the time the people next choose their TDs. And even the people of Dublin Bay South, for all that they love to be progressive, won’t choose Ms. Chu over the far more tempting prospect of giving the greens a kick, and electing some insufferable Social Democrat instead.