Local and European elections: Four big trends that emerged from campaigns

By the time you are reading this – I assume a leisurely brunch is the civilised habit of Inside Politics readers of a Saturday – the ballot boxes will likely have been opened. Counting of the millions of pieces of paper which collectively contain the fate of thousands of candidates (who will be enjoying, I hope, a decent morning lie-in) will be under way.

Tallies and early takes will come in, first in a trickle, then a flood. Our conclusions about the intense three weeks or so of the campaign will inevitably soon be framed by the results.

But this can in a way be misleading – not everything the winners did will have worked, and not everything the losers did will have been a disaster. But that’s often how we think of campaigns. So let’s recap a few things about the important things we saw during the last few weeks before the results completely take over.

1. Campaigns are getting nastier. Much nastier. Politicians of all parties say the vast majority of people are polite and receptive. But a minority of people are not, and that minority seem to have both grown and become more abusive and threatening.

Two notices pinned up in a country pub offer an insight into the paradox of Eamon Ryan

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A Labour-Social Democrats alliance makes political sense. Voters have already worked this out

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Local and European elections: Four big trends that emerged from campaigns

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A giveaway pre-election budget is inevitable - the only question is just how generous will it be?

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Increasingly, some people apply the vituperative vernacular of the online world to their in-person behaviour. This week, Supriya Singh, who is running in Donaghmede, told Sorcha Pollak how canvassing has become “intimidating” and “demoralising”. Her story is echoed by many candidates who were not born in Ireland – and by many who were. This is profoundly depressing, but it is a fact of our politics now.

Perhaps those who heaped such personal, vitriolic abuse on politicians in the Fine Gael-Labour government during the dark days of austerity might reflect on what that change of tone has wrought. Some of them are now on the receiving end of it themselves. So is everyone else. As gardaí prepared to keep a close eye on count centres today, it was clear that our democratic processes, and the people who participate in them, require more robust protections.

2. Migration has landed right in the middle of our politics with a bang, and it’s going to be there for the foreseeable future. Poll after poll confirms that the multiple anecdotal reports from candidates on the doors are not mistaken: many voters consider migration – itself a huge topic, much broader than the narrow lens of asylum seekers through which many perceive the issue – to be a major issue when they are thinking about politics. It is true that the pressures caused by migration are greatly exacerbated by the housing crisis. This is what people who spoke to Kitty Holland in Tallaght South this week meant when they told her: “The Government are making us racists.”

[ European election candidates raise €90,000 for campaigns through online crowdfunding ]

No, they’re not: if you’re a racist, that’s on you, pal. But what is true is that because of a failure to prepare and a reluctance to take hard and unpopular decisions – two of the traditional great failings of Irish governments – the conditions are now present for overtly or implicitly racist narratives to gain traction. From there, the bottom-feeding politicians who always flock to them can flourish. That trend, I fear, will continue, no matter who does or does not get elected today.

Differing trends have emerged for the parties in the past three weeks. We’ll see how these will ultimately play out over the coming days

3. Nobody wants to talk about defence. As Europe figures out how to meet an aggressive Russia waging a war on its borders, Ireland prefers endless prattling about neutrality, happy to let someone else man the barricades. Let us hope events don’t force us to face up to the world as it actually is.

Differing trends have emerged for the parties in the past three weeks. We’ll see how these will ultimately play out over the coming days, but for now, uncontaminated by the clarity of the numbers, let us note a few of them. The drift to Independent candidates of all stripes has been unmistakable. It’s impossible to quantify the political direction of this, because Independents come – to put it mildly – in all shapes and sizes, and all political hues. Undoubtedly, many of them are migration-sceptics. But many are just “none-of-the-above” options.

Sinn Féin’s Napoleonic retreat from Moscow has been brutal. The party should still gain a lot of seats. But it has been shaken to its core. Expect a back-to-basics response.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have managed to be electoral rivals with a minimum of friction. The general election will be harder in that respect. But this campaign shows it’s not impossible.

There is some life in Labour. Let’s not overstate it. But the party has had the best campaign of the soft or progressive left parties.

[ ‘As a woman and an elder, I have a lot of experience’: Meet Ireland’s older local election candidates ]

4. The green agenda has declined in political prominence. Like most small parties in Government, the Green Party seems to be set for a difficult day as the results come in, but perhaps not as bad as some fear. More substantially, though, the political will to implement climate action has been visibly waning across Europe during the campaign. Ursula von der Leyen’s “European Green Deal” – a cocktail of policy measures and funding designed to shift the Continent towards renewable energy and sustainable practices – is under pressure from farmers, from the unpopularity of measures that consumers don’t like, from the rise of the populist right and the outbreak of the heebie jeebies among von der Leyen’s EPP, the largest EU political grouping.

The hoped-for acceleration of decarbonisation seems likely to go in the opposite direction, as governments prepare for the impacts of climate change rather than trying to stop it. Of course, they need to do both – in the long-term, all governments will have to work together to reverse emissions growth and the loss of habitats. But more severe climate shocks may be needed to jolt them into it. The immediate future for Europe seems less, not more, green. This is one of the big stories of campaign 2024 – maybe the biggest.

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