ANALYSIS:The surge for Fine Gael since the campaign began has rattled a Labour Party which had hopes of becoming the biggest party in State, writes STEPHEN COLLINS
ONE OF the most momentous elections in Irish political history has taken an unexpected turn in recent days with the increasingly bitter exchanges between the main Opposition parties, Fine Gael and Labour.
The scale of the collapse in the Fianna Fáil vote has been the most astonishing feature of the campaign and has triggered a battle between the main Opposition parties for dominance in the newly emerging political landscape.
The surge in support for Fine Gael since the election campaign started has clearly rattled a Labour Party which, only six months ago, had serious hopes of becoming the biggest party in the State – with the slogan “Gilmore for Taoiseach” central to its campaign.
Labour’s negative recent newspaper advertisements about Fine Gael have taken that battle to a new level – and there are now some doubts about whether the two parties would be able to work together in coalition when the dust has settled.
The two parties blame each other for the row, but the implosion of Fianna Fáil probably made it inevitable one way or another. In the extraordinary circumstances of the Government being effectively out of the battle for power, it is hardly a surprise that the two parties in contention have squared up to each other.
Fine Gael Dublin South West TD Brian Hayes summed it up: “We are feasting over the carcass of Fianna Fáil. This isn’t an election between us and Fianna Fáil. It’s between Fine Gael and Labour,” he said.
What has come as a surprise to many has been the strength and coherence of a Fine Gael campaign which has been strong enough to put it within striking distance of single-party government with just over a week to go to polling day.
Ironically, the perceived weakness of Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny has turned out to be a source of strength for the party. Instead of relying on posters of the leader to carry it through the election campaign, Fine Gael began detailed planning last summer. It came up with a detailed policy based around five key issues that could be easily assimilated by the voters.
Plans for the leader’s tour, election literature based around an easily digested five-point plan, constituency strategies, poster design and the campaign slogan “Let’s Get Ireland Working” were all far advanced when the Greens announced in November the Government’s days were numbered.
“We defined the ground we wanted to fight on and we set out to have the battle on that ground,” said one of the party’s key strategists.
“Instead of having to respond to a variety of unexpected questions during the campaign, we set out to frame the questions through our five-point plan, and we made sure that everybody at all levels in the party had the answers. We were determined to fight on our plan and not on the Fianna Fáil budget – and so far we have succeeded.”
The Fine Gael strategy also focused on the strength of the party’s team. At his manifesto launch, Enda Kenny was joined on the platform by Michael Noonan, Phil Hogan, Leo Varadkar, Richard Bruton and James Reilly. The emphasis on experience and talent was deliberate.
“We also had the advantage that most of us from Enda down were battle-hardened from 2007,” said the Fine Gael strategist. “We had fought a campaign together, and we have hopefully been able to learn from the experience and from our mistakes. One crucial point was that we have a number of pillars to our strategy, while Labour have only one – Eamon Gilmore. Now that the ‘Gilmore for Taoiseach’ ploy has failed, they have nowhere to go.”
One vital part of the Fine Gael strategy was a commitment not to raise income tax, and another was to implement the reduction in government deficit to 3 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in four years. From the beginning, Fine Gael set out to highlight its differences with Labour on these issues.
“We knew that Labour would start the campaign by trying to get the media and the public to accept the old cliché of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil as tweedledum and tweedledee. We knew that we had to demolish that one early on and get the debate on to our five-point plan,” he added.
Fine Gael’s decision to set out to portray Labour as a high tax party rankled with its potential coalition partners. “From the beginning of the campaign our canvassers reported back that they were picking up a Fine Gael mantra on the doorsteps that Labour was a high tax party,” said one of Labour’s campaign team.
“We were very annoyed about that because everybody knows that Eamon Gilmore pledged from the beginning that nobody earning less than €100,000 would have to pay more tax under Labour’s plans. Fine Gael set out in a systematic and organised way to misrepresent our position, and we had to take it on and confront it,” he added.
The feedback from the doorsteps was confirmed for Labour through a number of interviews given by Michael Noonan. Labour decided to hit back, first with statements and then with advertisements casting doubt on Fine Gael’s projections about government borrowing, and claiming that the party’s policy for cutting the deficit would lead to increased taxes and cuts in services.
The row with Fine Gael aside, Gilmore’s performance during the campaign has been another issue for Labour. The tone of his “it’s Labour’s way or Frankfurt’s way” démarche early in the campaign cast doubts upon his grasp of politics at European level at a time when a real appreciation of Ireland’s precarious international position is critical.
By contrast, Kenny’s trips to see European Commission president José Manuel Barroso and German Chancellor Angela Merkel struck a better chord. While both trips were clearly electioneering ploys, they conveyed an image of a politician who is building the right kind of bridges for the horribly difficult journey ahead.
“To be fair to Eamon, he built his reputation and his standing with the public on the theatre of his confrontations with Cowen in the Dáil,” said a supporter. “The televised election debates are a very different kind and don’t allow for the kind of direct confrontation at which he was so good in the Dáil. That said, his personal ratings are still high in the polls going into the last week of the campaign.”
Despite the rivalry, senior people in Fine Gael and Labour are confident they will be able to work out a coalition deal. “The country needs a strong and stable government and we will not lose sight of that fact,” said one senior Fine Gael figure. “It would be irresponsible in the extreme to try and cobble together a minority government based on the support of Independents with widely differing agendas.”
He added that neither could the country afford to have a squabbling Fine Gael-Labour coalition as it had in the 1980s. He pointed to the strong record of the rainbow government of the 1990s as an example for the two parties.
A Labour figure made exactly the same point. “There are few people around from the 1980s government, but the senior people in both parties worked well together in the 1990s and can do so again. Still, there will be huge difficulties in negotiating a programme for government – and nothing can be taken for granted.”
Stephen Collins is Political Editor