I live in a small village in the south of Germany. It’s a quiet life far from the rancour and rootlessness of cosmopolitan hubs. My neighbour, who is more interested in taking care of his retired racing pigeons than politics, is in shock. He asks me to repeat myself to make sure he understands what I am saying. “In Ireland, refugees can vote and stand in Local Elections.”
It’s difficult for him to imagine so I pull up an article on my phone about Natalia Krasnenkova, a Ukrainian refugee who has been living in Killarney for two years and is now running for a seat on Kerry County Council. I explain that she is one of almost 70 non-nationals running in upcoming Local Elections. After a brief pause to process this information, he says, “I find that very arrogant.”
It is unfathomable to him that someone would come to a nation seeking refuge, be put up in hotel accommodation as Ms Krasnenkova was, be given a taxpayer-funded stipend, only to then have the audacity to tell natives how to run their own affairs. “They should be thankful for what Irish people have given them and stay out of politics,” he insists before adding, “Irish people are vary naive to let this happen.”
Of course, he has no idea of the rate of social, political and demographic change in Ireland over the past two decades – a change from one of the most homogenous countries in Europe to a nation in which 22% of its population was born elsewhere. To many in Ireland, my neighbour’s words will sound offensive, taboo even. Yet it is the radically progressive Irish political class who are out of step with the European mainland.
In Germany, full voting rights are reserved for citizens only. EU residents living in Germany are entitled to vote in Local and European Elections. Non-EU residents are not entitled to vote in any election. In Ireland, the right to vote in Local Elections was extended to all people including refugees and asylum seekers in April 2004. This is still an unknown fact to many Irish people and it slipped under the radar back then as for the year 2004, there were ‘only’ 4,265 first time asylum applications. Significant for a small nation, but arguably manageable.
However, in 2022 alone there were 13,651 asylum applications – outside of the 70,493 temporary protection permissions that were handed out to Ukrainian refugees. And the numbers are set to increase for 2024 with the first five weeks of the year alone seeing a record 1,333 applicants. An increased flow of asylum seekers over the border with Northern Ireland in the wake of the UK’s Rwanda scheme has further driven a spike in numbers. All of these people are entitled to vote in upcoming Local Elections.
It might seem unlikely that those who have just arrived in Ireland, not least those currently camped out in tents along the banks of the Grand Canal, playing cat and mouse with government removal teams, have the time or the inclination to get involved in politics. But some will, and because of poor government migration policy, they are well placed to win due to outsized representation in certain localities. Let’s look at Natalia Krasnenkova again.
The most recent figures show that in the Killarney Local Election constituency, there are 2,575 Ukrainian refugees. In 2019, ten candidates stood for seven seats. The quota was 1,584 and Labour councillor Marie Moloney got the seventh seat with a mere 871 first preferences. If Krasnenkova rallies the Ukrainian bloc in Killarney, she will be easily elected.
As The Irish Independent recently reported, Krasnenkova is a ‘well known…leader among the Ukrainian community’ in Killarney and with recently announced cuts to Ukrainian benefits, it will be easy for her to rally that base. Indeed, it will be a surprise if Krasnenkova is not elected in June.
Should Krasnenkova succeed, it is entirely likely that Ireland will enter the era of ethnic bloc voting – a race-based pluralist democracy. Were Ukrainians to step forward in County Clare this time out, they would be similarly guaranteed seats in Ennistymon, where there are 2,252 Ukrainian refugees and the quota in 2019 was 1,720.
A candidate would have a good shot in Ennis, a constituency with 1,176 Ukrainians, where Ann Norton took the last available seat with 925 1st preferences in 2019. This number-crunching isn’t abstract. Since mid-April, a collective of several NGOs, including the Clare Immigrant Support Centre, Clare Solidarity Network and Quare Clare LGBTQ+, have been registering refugees in emergency accommodation and in direct provision to vote in upcoming Local Elections.
Leftist government-funded NGOs running get-out-the-vote operations in refugee centres will, of course, be of no surprise to most conservatives. International leftists have long encouraged mass migration as a potential pathway to expanded voter bases.\
While Germany currently has a sensible approach to non-national voting access, it is not for a lack of effort by leftist politicians to undermine it. Nancy Faeser, Germany’s Interior Minister and the hard left end of the ruling Social Democrat Party (SPD), suggested last September that all immigrants who have been in the country for a minimum of six months should be allowed to vote in local elections. Her ruling coalition recently passed a sweeping citizenship reform law which reduced the waiting period for citizenship from eight years to five, and three for high-skill immigrants.
In Germany, there are twelve million non-citizens, all of whom the left will see as future SPD voters. In the US, Democrats have long courted the immigrant vote through various amnesty bills such as Obama’s (now deemed unconstitutional) DACA and DAPA policies which together would have granted amnesty to more than five million illegals.
What makes Ireland unique is that there is no main conservative party in the Dáil to push back against leftist migration policies. All mainstream parties support the radical 2004 refugee right-to-vote law, each one believing that they will benefit from it. None, however, seem to care to look across the Irish Sea where a more likely outcome for an ethnic-based pluralist democracy played out over two elections in recent months.
In March, George Galloway won a parliamentary by-election in a Labour stronghold after rallying the large Muslim population in Rochdale against the War in Gaza. It was a crass example of playing to ethnic division. In May, Mothin Ali of The Greens won a council seat in a Labour stronghold in Leeds after similarly rallying the Muslim vote. The day after the October 7th Hamas attacks in Israel, Ali stated that Israelis were ‘white supremacists’ and that Gaza was ‘the biggest concentration camp the world has ever seen.’
Both cases reveal the inevitable, poisonous and profoundly anti-democratic outcome of ethnic-based voting blocs. The latter case shows that despite the establishment left’s presumed claim to the immigrant vote, over time, poorly assimilated ethnic blocs will look to their own, and are bound to fight for their own interests.
This is the fractious future my pigeon-fancying neighbour would have Ireland avoid if only our naive politicians would listen.
Dr. Eoin Lenihan is an independent journalist and researcher. His work has been featured on AlJazeera and Fox News. He has written for The European Conservative, The Federalist, Arutz Sheeva, Quillette, The Post Millennial, and The Daily Caller. You can find more from Eoin on X @EoinLenihan and on his website, www.eoinlenihan.net.