'Prospera omnes sibi indicant," Tacitus wrote, "aduersa uni imputantur". Which roughly translates as the adage that "Success has many fathers..." And so it was with the remarkable showing in this week's Irish Times Ipsos/MRBI poll of both Fianna Fáil – up nine percentage points – and its leader Micheál Martin, basking now in a confidence rating of 43 per cent (in these times that's very good!).
Although many might be generously inclined to attribute the former to the latter’s charisma and leadership qualities, and some to the forgetfulness of the average voter, today’s additional poll findings suggest another explanation.
Of the 55 per cent of all voters surveyed who approved in the wake of the hung-Dáil election of putting Fine Gael back in power, two out of three of them (37 to 18 per cent of all voters), and three out of four such Fianna Fáil voters (43 to 15 per cent), favoured an arrangement in which the latter supported a Fine Gael administration but stayed out of government.
That 57 per cent of Fine Gael supporters favoured the support-from-outside option for Fianna Fáil is scarcely surprising – that option, as it did, would put Fine Gael back in government unencumbered by the need to deal with Fianna Fáil ministers in cabinet. That’s called “win, win”.
But the support of a substantial majority of Fianna Fáil supporters for the outside-support option both strongly vindicates Martin’s and the party’s decision to stay out and reflects an interesting new view of politics. While these voters have clearly internalised the lessons of Labour’s unfortunate experience inside coalition, they have also accepted the argument made widely after the election that Fianna Fáil has a duty to contribute to stability. And that, despite an election that was bitter and personal, the politics of protest and the idea that an opposition’s duty is simply to oppose are perhaps passing.
Voters, the poll may be suggesting, are returning to Fianna Fáil perhaps in part because they see in the party’s ongoing rebranding some harbingers of “new politics”.