Here’s a fun hypothetical: Imagine that you could go back in time, just over a year ago, to the date of the last Fine Gael leadership election and inform the Fine Gael electorate that in April 2025, the party would be a junior coalition partner to a revitalised Fianna Fáil, and that it would be on 16% in the most recent Irish Times opinion poll. Further, that at the last general election, the party’s momentum was destroyed by a terrible moment for Simon Harris with a woman in a shop in Cork.
If you told them all of that, would they still have elected him leader?
Not, I would suggest, on your life.
The raw fact is this: In political terms, the first year of Simon Harris’s leadership has been a political disaster for Fine Gael. The party stalled out and lost vote share at the general election (and would have gone backwards in terms of seat numbers as well had the overall number of seats on offer not increased). At the European Elections last year, it lost one of its seats. It lost seats too, at the local elections.
Simon Harris has fought three elections – local, european, and general – as leader of Fine Gael. In each of the three elections, his party has done worse than in their previous outings. The shifts have not been dramatic – fractions of a percentage point in some cases – but they have all been in one direction.
Far from “a new energy”, his leadership now looks increasingly like a step backwards for his party.
Why? Why has it all gone so wrong? A few factors, I think, have combined to make his leadership a failure.
First, the entire basis of his appeal was a miscalculation by Fine Gael, who thought the public wanted – as their General Election campaign noted – “a new energy”. They had perhaps missed that this entire approach was one that they had already tried, and which had already failed, in the case of Leo Varadkar. Varadkar was just 45 when he left office, having taken up the leadership of Fine Gael in his early thirties as the vanguard of a “new generation” in Irish politics. Indeed Varadkar’s whole strategy had been to promote youth at the expense of experience – he gave us Harris himself, and Helen McEntee, and promoted other young turk types like Patrick O’Donovan, minister for the OPW and bike sheds, as well as the likes of Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, who has now been fast-tracked into cabinet by Harris.
Fine Gael had already tried the “new energy” thing. It hadn’t worked.
Second, there’s the essential problem that “energy” is not a substitute for ideas, and Fine Gael has very few of those.
Indeed, here’s the problem: Fine Gael at the election attempted to draw a contrast with Fianna Fáil in terms of what we might call generational energy. But when you looked at both party’s manifestos, they were as close to functionally identical as the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael manifestos have ever been. When Simon Harris was asked to translate his energiser bunny brand into actual ideas to improve the country, the “new energy” ended up simply meaning “the same policies as Fianna Fáil, but on TikTok”.
That gives rise to a basic problem: If the choice is between youth and experience, with the exact same policies, why wouldn’t a sensible voter choose experience? Especially when the United States has just elected Mr. Trump, and the headwinds start to get a bit buffety. Play this out in any other area of life: If you are hiring a builder to build your house, and both say they will do the exact same job for the exact same price, are you going to hire the guy who has never built a house before, or they guy who has built thousands?
The third problem is related: Can anybody – anybody now – point to one serious point of difference between Fine Gael under Varadkar and Fine Gael under Harris? Has there been any notable policy u-turn, absent a minor hardening of rhetoric around immigration which has been matched by Fianna Fáil?
Rarely in Irish politics has a leadership change meant so little policy or stylistic change. Consider for example Fianna Fáil under Charles Haughey, Albert Reynolds, and Bertie Ahern – they may as well have been three different parties. Each leader had differing views on big policy questions. With Fine Gael, we have literally just been asked, as a voting public, to change our view of them because there’s a new face.
And this brings us to the core problem: That Fine Gael’s policy offering is deeply, deeply unattractive right across the electorate. The “traditionally conservative” party is anything but, while at the same time being much too blue-blooded and wedded to the establishment to woo left wing voters. Its social liberalism is offered in much truer fashion by Labour and the Social Democrats. Its generic American Democrat view of economics and foreign policy is catered for by Fianna Fáil. Its tolerance of public sector waste and mis-spending renders it pointless to anybody who wants a party that promotes accountability. It has become simply a mindless establishment blob party, whose sole offering to the public is a fiver on the pension here or a small tax cut there in return for putting up with its systemic incompetence on the matter of actually governing.
Smart Fine Gaelers – and they do exist – will tell you that their party actually needs a good break from Government and a period in opposition to figure out what it is. I will add to that that it also needs a new leader. One with new ideas, not just new energy.