Simon Harris is not Fine Gael’s biggest problem, but neither is he necessarily the solution. Last week’s Irish Times/Ipsos B & A opinion poll put Fine Gael at a historic low of 16 per cent, while a recent Red C poll had it at 17 per cent, but political unpopularity may not count as much as it used to. Fine Gael staged three balefully bad general election campaigns in a row but in 2027 it will become the party with the longest continuity in government in the history of the State.
Fine Gael outlasting the longevity of De Valera is comeuppance for Fianna Fáil – and is only spoiled for Fine Gael by the fact that it is the junior partner. It’s awkward, too, that Micheál Martin is more credible with many Fine Gael voters. The handful in either party who might become ministers have a stake in the bigger share of the spoils that go with having the largest number of seats. But the interchangeable muddle between both means that if they can collectively hold about 40 per cent of the vote, they have a better chance than the alternative of putting together a broader coalition. Fine Gael may be on its electoral uppers, but it still has a better than even chance of being in government after the next election.
Comparisons with Fianna Fáil are humiliating for Fine Gael, a party with a special hauteur towards its staunch opponents of nearly a century. That it has come to this is a pity, but it is the inevitable outcome of the eventual decision to go back into government in 2020, after the political setback of that election campaign. It was the moment after nine years in office when it could have reclaimed lost ground and an identity, but didn’t. Leo Varadkar could have led Fine Gael successfully in opposition, but he didn’t have the mettle. It was never even an option for Harris who would not have survived politically outside of government.
[ This is a shocker of an opinion poll for Fine GaelOpens in new window ]
Fine Gael has mastered – to a lesser degree – the art that Fianna Fáil long ago learned, which is to be, rather than to do. Being in government means you are busy, but Fine Gael’s mission and the identity the party once had is now so pale as to be barely discernible. The attrition of elections that were unsuccessful in every respect except holding on to power means that for the first time since 2011 Fianna Fáil has a stronger front bench. Harris, who seeks to be all things to all men and women, could as easily be in Labour or the Social Democrats, while Fianna Fáil has a plausible Fine Gael leader.
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All politics between the far left and far right is now social democratic. There is no centre-right, and certainly no Christian Democratic party. The problem for Fine Gael is that its own offspring are deserting it. The governing parties won the election because they were not the opposition. They committed to delivery, but little has happened for months, and there is a palpable sense of lethargy.
Since the election, the world has changed, however. The current climate of uncertainty seemingly favours Micheál Martin who comes across as more assured than the perpetually busy Harris. But dark economic clouds offer a silver lining for Fine Gael. It could reassert its identity as a party of restraint and responsibility. A spat last weekend between its Dublin councillors and Fine Gael ministers who dumped on the proposal they supported for a tourist tax in the capital didn’t bode well. The proposition came from the Taskforce for Dublin. Taoiseach Simon Harris welcomed it last October, saying the city “ ... deserves a vision. We now have it.”
A tourist tax isn’t the issue – but the party’s reactive refusal to consider anything that is challenging politically is a problem. Some in Fine Gael plead that years in government with multiple partners have undermined its identity. They have a point. Government dulls the senses politically and leads to the confusion that simply being there is doing something. The time in government since 2016 were locust years, when crowd-pleasing was preferred over making choices. Fine Gael became a party running a free bar but with few friends.
This is the moment where there is an opportunity to reassert what the party once stood for, when it had an identity that was mildly right of centre, supportive of business but not in the pocket of it, restrained in its instincts, and careful with the public purse because it knew that wealth must be created before it can be spent. “No” was a word in its vocabulary, and helping people to help themselves was a better choice than bloating the State to provide for them directly.
The fragmentation of politics means that defeat and victory can be the same thing. It is not about how reduced you are, it’s about whether your numbers are still necessary. But that doesn’t answer the question of what Fine Gael is for, it simply explains what the party does.
