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Local and European elections: Five things we learned on Sunday

Despite how engrossing this campaign has been, there is every reason to take a beat before overinterpreting the outcome

Local and European elections: Counting is expected to continue overnight into Monday morning. Photograph Nick Bradshaw/The Irish Times
Local and European elections: Counting is expected to continue overnight into Monday morning. Photograph Nick Bradshaw/The Irish Times
Jack Horgan-Jones's picture
Jack Horgan-Jones
Sun Jun 09 2024 - 21:22

With over half of local seats filled – but not a European count in sight – the shape of the 2024 elections is beginning to emerge. With the usual caveat that given the vagaries of our voting system, that shape may change, here’s five things we learned so far on Sunday.

Immigration politics

There will be a handful of anti-immigration candidates elected – much less than had been feared in some quarters, and certainly fewer than had been on ballots up and down the country. There are different ways of looking at this.

Some will take comfort from the fact that councils won’t be controlled by far right activists, or anything like it; but another, perhaps more meaningful way of looking at it, is that immigration politics has made it on to the ballot paper as never before, and it has attracted thousands of votes. In the aftermath of the vote, a number of far-right groups who have underperformed in local elections began spreading baseless claims of election fraud.

Whether immigration politics, which has proven so potent across Europe, is something that will peak and recede or is a lasting inflection point in Irish politics remains to be seen. But we are definitely in uncharted territory.

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LOCAL ELECTIONS

Blow to Sinn Féin

The party has dramatically underperformed expectations, polling and probably its own worst fears. Mary Lou McDonald was putting a brave face on it at the RDS, promising to step up with a renewed energy and a focus on the details of their policy platform. But the troubling thing for the party is that the link between its housing critique and its polling performance seems to be fractured if not totally broken.

Where to from here?

Does it have time to overhaul its message? Should it? Or should it double down and keep the faith, remembering the bounceback from 2019 it experienced the following year? Where once it was sure-footed, now these questions will abound. As first counts in Europe loom into view on Sunday evening, the speculation was that it would be under pressure in all three European constituencies. It would seem very difficult to believe it won’t secure at least two MEP seats, but even that would be an underperformance compared to targets. And it would have seemed very difficult to believe its local election performance as recently as Friday. Things can get worse.

Centre-left holds its own

This is especially the case in Dublin, where the Social Democrats and Labour are having a good day. The former will be disappointed, in all likelihood, with its European outing but there are also silver linings for it in west Cork where it looks set to take two seats in Holly Cairns’ home patch. The Greens will lose around half their seats at local level, party strategists believe.

There is a credible plea in mitigation for the party, given the fortunes of junior partners in coalitions past during midterm elections, but much of the complexion for the party will be determined by the fortunes of Ciarán Cuffe in Dublin. The same could be argued for Aodhán Ó Ríordáin who will battle for the same seat – but that party already seems energised by this campaign in a way that has been lacking for a decade.

General election fever

Maybe it’s the absence of hard news out of the European counts, or maybe it’s the excess of giddiness in Fine Gael – but there is a real drumbeat of general election chat doing the rounds. Even senior ministers who don’t favour an early election privately concede the wind may be blowing that way. Taoiseach Simon Harris played it down, but there’s no getting away from the tempo shift which will make this chatter one of the only frames people will view politics through across the coming months.

Don’t overestimate

Notwithstanding how engrossing this election has been, there is every reason to take a beat before overinterpreting the outcome. Turnout was only around half the electorate, and it’s a tired refrain, but general elections are very different beasts. People zero in on national issues and policies that will hit them directly in a way that simply doesn’t animate local and European contests. The campaigns are incredibly dynamic – remember the pensions row from 2020.

Europe

This is a bit of a cheat because really, we haven’t learned a huge amount about the MEP races at all on Sunday. The effort to keep a reliable tally going in Dublin collapsed early and there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of solid data coming out of Ireland South or Midlands North West. So while people have been getting elected all day long in the locals, the absence of data or counts means the only surpluses in Europe have been spare hot takes circulating in the count centre.

This will all change from 10pm when a Dublin count is expected, with counting also predicted to continue into the night. It is less certain when we will get a count from the other constituencies. The only safe-ish prediction is that it looks like there will be a total scramble for the final seats in all three constituencies.