This week’s contest to fill Northern Ireland’s seats at Westminster offers an intriguing subplot both to electoral politics in the UK and on the island of Ireland in this year of elections. The substantial majority which the Labour party seems set to win on Thursday means the North’s representatives will not hold much sway in the next parliament. But after 14 years of Conservative rule, a change of government will bring a new dynamic to East-West and North-South relationships. Meanwhile, results from the 18 constituencies will be parsed for their local consequences as well as their implications for the broader constitutional question.
Sinn Féin, the largest party on the island, seems well placed to hold its seven Westminster seats, although the perennial marginal of Fermanagh and South Tyrone may have been imperilled by the party’s decision to run long-standing MP Michelle Gildernew unsuccessfully in June’s European Parliament elections. With more councillors and MLAs than its rivals already, Sinn Féin could also now end up by default with the largest number of MPs, subject to the fortunes of the DUP. That would give it some cause for cheer following bruising local and European results and an opinion poll slump south of the Border. As ever, the political dynamics of the North are rather different from those in the South.
For the DUP, which goes into the election with eight seats, the challenge will be to minimise the damage wrought by the shock departure of Jeffrey Donaldson as party leader following his arrest and charging over alleged historical sexual offences. Prior to those events, Donaldson had successfully steered his divided party back into the Northern Ireland Executive on the basis of concessions he had supposedly won on the provisions of the Northern Ireland Protocol. These have been rejected as worthless by anti-Protocol hardliners and the key test for the party will be whether that scepticism is reflected in support for Jim Allister’s TUV to a degree that would leave the DUP vulnerable to threats from Alliance in East Belfast and Lagan Valley, or from the UUP in South Antrim. Were recently appointed DUP leader Gavin Robinson to lose his East Belfast seat to Alliance leader Naomi Long, that could be particularly destabilising for the party and, by extension, for the Executive, which has only been back up and running for five months.
With the SDLP well positioned to hold on to its two seats, attention will therefore be concentrated on whether or not the DUP can maintain its current tally and with it the symbolic status of being Northern Ireland’s largest parliamentary party. If it can do that, or at least minimise its losses, that could go some way towards bedding in the North’s institutions, which, despite a heartening return to business in recent months, still remain fragile.