ANALYSIS:It's all over – bar the voting – and the much underestimated Enda Kenny has brought Fine Gael to the brink of a historic win, writes STEPHEN COLLINS
AT A CROWDED final Fine Gael election press conference yesterday, the party’s director of elections Phil Hogan paid tribute to Enda Kenny for the inexorable rise in the party’s support during the campaign. He remarked with a smile that his leader had been underestimated by everybody once again.
Since he took over a beaten and demoralised party in 2002, Kenny has been consistently underestimated, particularly by Fianna Fáil and most of the media. Only last summer, almost half his own parliamentary party were so spooked by the constant criticism of his leadership that they tried to remove him from his job.
Now, seven months on, he has brought Fine Gael to a position where it will almost certainly become the biggest party in the Dáil for the first time in its history. Not only that, but there is even a chance that Fine Gael could win an undreamt of overall majority.
Kenny and his team have run a superb campaign and have dictated the political pace from the weekend before Brian Cowen dissolved the 30th Dáil. The party was ready to go with its much publicised five-point plan. That was followed by a daily schedule that dominated the media agenda and the campaign on the ground.
More to the point, Kenny and Hogan made the right calls at every turn. They ignored the TV3 leaders’ debate, refused to get sucked into a snarling match with Labour and kept the focus on their commitment to keep income tax down and deal with the problems in the public finances primarily through spending cuts.
Party canvassers were supplied with a detailed breakdown of party policies, with instructions to focus attention on the doorsteps on Fianna Fáil’s record in power and also to emphasise that Labour was a high tax party.
Debating has never been Kenny’s strong point but, having avoided the early campaign joust on TV3, he performed well enough in the three television debates. His confidence clearly grew with each week of the campaign and he was never troubled at his press conferences. He simply stuck to the plan and refused to be budged from it, whatever the opponents or media said.
That unflappable approach is what made him such a successful party leader and it will, hopefully, stand him in good stead when he becomes taoiseach.
The unexpected bonus for Fine Gael over the past two weeks was that a significant segment of the traditional Fianna Fáil electorate appeared to have switched allegiance to Fine Gael. This has been particularly noticeable to canvassers from all parties in the middle-class suburbs of Dublin.
One of the motivations behind the switch is a desire for a strong government that does not include Labour.
Hogan made a final pitch for that vote yesterday, appealing to “decent Fianna Fáil voters” who are appalled by what has happened to the country to give Fine Gael “the loan of their votes” this time around. He called on voters to give their preferences to the Fine Gael ticket but made no recommendation about what they should do after that.
Fine Gael managed early on to capture momentum, the most prized currency in elections, and has not relinquished it. The only question now is whether it will take the party across the line and into the hallowed territory of single-party government.
By contrast, the Labour campaign went into a slide in the first week of the campaign and never managed to recover fully. It took time for the penny to drop that the angry tone that worked so well for Eamon Gilmore in the Dáil for the past two years was not working in the different context of an election campaign.
The adoption of the kind of rhetoric on the EU that is the stock in trade of Sinn Féin and candidates of the hard left alienated middle- class voters who had been flocking to Labour in opinion polls over the past two years. The decision to stick with the “Gilmore for Taoiseach” slogan when it was patently not working was also a mistake.
The decision to take out newspaper ads attacking Fine Gael was understandable, given the provocation offered by the “Labour is a high tax party” line, but the negative message was not the one the electorate wanted to hear. Having spent two years attacking Fianna Fáil, the decision to attack Fine Gael left voters scratching their heads, wondering what Labour was actually for.
When things were at their worst for the party, one of the rare positive performances came from Siptu president Jack O’Connor, who is regularly demonised in sections of the media. In a thoughtful contribution to RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland, O’Connor made the valid point that the kind of decisions facing the next government would require not simply a Dáil majority but a consensus across society.
He pointed out that in Germany, the two great political traditions of post-war Europe, Christian Democracy and Social Democracy, had come together when the country has been faced with economic crises. He suggested that Fine Gael and Labour needed to do the same here.
It was not until the last week of the campaign that Gilmore struck a positive note. He performed very well in the final three-way leaders’ debate, and while it might have been too late to start reeling in Fine Gael, it may have at least stopped Labour’s slide.
Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin was by far the most aggressive performer in the debates, but it is difficult to know if it did any good. His party is now such a toxic brand that most of the voters are not prepared to listen to his message. Martin’s tactic is to try to put some heart into the party’s core vote, but it may be too late.
The plight of Fianna Fáil is still too astonishing for most people involved in politics to really grasp. The party that has dominated politics for 79 years at election after election has simply imploded; the last opinion polls of the campaign indicate it will be lucky to get more than 20 seats. The only hope for the party is that a significant segment of the 20 per cent who claim to be undecided are really Fianna Fáil voters who are too embarrassed to declare their loyalty.
The Greens are also in a battle for survival. While it was widely forecast at the beginning of the campaign that the party would be wiped out, there are glimmers of hope that two or three of its TDs could make it back to the Dáil. Eamon Ryan and Trevor Sargent are the most likely to survive, but it would be a mistake to write off John Gormley, as his clever tactic of offering his party as a coalition partner for Fine Gael could pay dividends.
Sinn Féin fought a determined and predictable campaign and will be back with more seats, although maybe not as many as earlier forecast. Independents of all hues from “toffs to Trots”, as well as a plethora of purely local constituency representatives, will be well represented in the next Dáil, but the two big stories of the weekend will be how well Fine Gael – and how badly Fianna Fáil – ultimately perform.
Stephen Collins is Political Editor