Gavan Reilly: How one opinion poll has killed off an early general election
It’s a long weekend, so you probably weren’t paying much attention to the news – and even if you were, you might have missed a pretty salient piece of information on the political front.
For quietly, nestled inside the pages of the Business Post, was as clear an indication as you’ll ever get that the next general election will not take place until March 2025.
For a while now there have been two duelling opinions swirling around Leinster House, about the timing of the next general election. There are some (and I personally fall into this category), who think the outgoing coalition has such an unlikely prospect of being re-elected, it will act purely in self interest and stay in power for as long as possible. Let’s face it: with the opinion polls being as they are, there is almost no chance of Fine Gael being back in power after an election (and having never previously strung two successive terms together, re-election is an unlikely four in a row), so Leo Varadkar’s best prospect for remaining in office is to wait as long as possible and hold out for a change in the political winds.
A secondary aspect of this theory is that the local elections could provide a plan for a political diversion. Sinn Fein had such a poor local election in 2019 – remember when people were questioning Mary Lou’s role as leader? – that even an average performance for them will bring sweeping gains nationwide. Some in the coalition think (hope?) this could breed a false sense of security, where Sinn Féin takes its eye off the ball for the general election to follow, in a de facto repeat of 2020 when even the headquarters on Parnell Square didn’t foresee their success.
The shortcoming in this theory is a level of electoral introspection most ordinary people simply don’t need to sink to: the link between the local elections and the next Seanad. The 949 councillors elected next June will form the lion’s share (81 per cent) of the electorate for the next Seanad, and a strong performance for opposition parties at council level could, in extreme circumstances, leave a Seanad majority out of reach for the coalition. There are 60 seats in the next Chamber, and while the incoming Taoiseach has the prerogative to appoint 11 of them, there is zero prospect of the coalition winning any of the six University seats – so we could have a coalition that retains a narrow majority in the Dáil, but unable to pass laws because it has no majority in the chamber at the other end of the corridor.
This leads to the second theory: that Varadkar could take a big gamble and call a snap election next spring, wielding the element of surprise as an electoral ploy to take the wind out of Sinn Féin sails. There is a self-interested logic to this: Sinn Féin is in line for so many extra seats next time around, that in many cases it simply doesn’t know who will fill them. The local elections, therefore, offer Mary Lou McDonald a chance to road-test certain candidates and see whether the electorate likes the cut of their jib. Calling a general election in advance allows the outgoing coalition to stick with as many of its previous candidates as possible – and open the prospect of novice Sinn Féin candidates being harangued in the national press for, say, naive statements made previously on social media. A coalition PR blitzkrieg, and an unprepared opposition, could be the best possible chance of pulling off a surprise electoral success. (It also means the next Seanad could be elected by the current councillors, not the new ones.)
The problem with this second theory depended on one underlying assumption: that the Budget would be popular. If you paid attention to Twitter last year (when that’s what it was still called) you would have seen plenty of Fine Gael TDs and Senators posting pictures of their morning canvasses in early spring, looking to harness some pro-government sentiment and test the water for the election to come. If the public felt grateful for the extra €75-ish on their January payslip, the gratitude might have been repaid in the ballot box. There was no prospect of Varadkar actually calling an election last spring (he had rotated as Taoiseach only months earlier) but the seeds were sown for a repeat in 2024.
That’s why the Red C poll in the Business Post comes in. Red C isn’t necessarily the holy grail of pollsters but its monthly reliability does leave it in high regard, so Sunday’s poll will have made for sobering reading on Merrion Street. In the first poll after a Budget of €11 billion, with tax cuts worth almost a grand, €450 in energy credits, increases to core welfare rates, multiple double payments, ringfenced funds for infrastructural and demographic futureproofing… and the two bigger parties are now further behind Sinn Féin than they were to begin with.
You can never rule out the prospect of changing moods next springtime when the payroll tax cuts come through, but the prospects are bleak. The best prospect now is to hunker down and pray for a change of mood: that means delaying the election as late as can be. March 2025 it is.