Congratulations then to Comrade Catherine Connolly, who will serve as first citizen of this republic for the next seven long years. The election was handed to her on a plate, but where others might have stumbled, she has glided to a landslide win even greater than the polls predicted.
Her victory should not be over-interpreted: In a low-turnout race where only left-leaning voters had a candidate to be enthused about, it should be no surprise that left-leaning voters turned out in a greater rate than anyone else, magnifying the scale of her victory. The polling conducted of voters by Ireland Thinks yesterday showed that: Only Connolly voters were voting “for” their candidate. A plurality of votes cast for everyone else, including spoiled ballots, were cast “against” somebody else.
The real story here is the disillusionment and alienation of an enormous swathe of voters. There were more spoiled ballots cast yesterday than in any election in the history of the state. The final total for people who went to the polling booth purposefully to actively reject their choices will likely exceed 200,000 people. Add those to Connolly’s total, and over 70% of all votes cast have been cast against the government parties.
The other story here is that hundreds of thousands of voters – most of them centrist types – just flat out sat on their hands. Having nobody to vote for, they simply stayed at home.
The net result of all of this is as follows: For the next seven years, Ireland will be saddled with a far-left, radical President. Somebody who loathes the United States, a vital economic partner to this country. Somebody who appears to disdain the European Union. Somebody more comfortable in the company of Bashar Al-Assad and his cronies than she ever would be in the company of President Trump or Charles III. The damage she has the potential to do is enormous. And she won in a landslide, with the support of just over 30% of the entire electorate.
If this is modern Ireland, it is a sorry place indeed: Headed as it will be by an aging socialist whose ideas have repeatedly been tried, and always failed, in every country that has been foolish enough to give them a chance. A country in which hundreds of thousands of people are angry enough to make the trip to a polling station to reject the democratic choices on offer as insufficient. And a country where rising anger about migration, crime, and housing goes entirely unmet by a political establishment that is entirely insulated from those concerns.
A word to those on the left, never happy even in victory, who are sneering about the scale of the spoiled vote and suggesting that their candidate would have won anyway: This is nonsense. First, because the spoiled vote only reflects a fraction of the dissatisfied with their choices. Second, because the limited choices available meant that the only challenger to Connolly was Heather Humphreys, a hapless candidate who was both unwilling and unable to challenge Connolly on her record in debates.
Third, it assumes that everyone who voted out of dissatisfaction spoiled their votes, which is nonsense: Many people, including a good number my readers, voted for Humphreys. Indeed, I almost did this myself, before I realised what the price would be: Simon Harris, putting a brave face on things today, claimed that “Fine Gael had won support higher than its core vote”. As I said he would, he presented reluctant votes for his candidate as an endorsement of his party.
Fine Gael ran this election as they have run so many others: Focused only on appeasing voters to their left, and doing nothing at all to inspire or recruit voters to their right. We had the nauseating spectacle of Humphreys utterly lying about her support for the inclusion of “services” in an occupied territories bill that is moribund. It did not win her a single vote. Yet that same candidate was unwilling even to raise her voice in anger this week at the sexual assault of a child by an immigrant. To hundreds of thousands of us, Heather Humphreys had nothing at all to say.
It is not surprising that Connolly won. She was the only candidate on the ballot representing opposition to how this country is being governed. That she happened to be the candidate of the left was likewise no barrier to some anti-Government voters settling on her. She was handed the election gift wrapped, with a little bow.
There is more to write, and say about this, but results like todays are clarifying. If you listen to the political bubble in Leinster House and the Irish media, you might almost fall victim to the political establishment’s delusion that the country is broadly happy, aside from a few small far-right cranks. Sometimes, that bubble gets pierced. Today is such a day.