Irish General Election (February 8th 2020)

[EastAnglianLefty]

Two questions:

1. Any particular reason Labour are stubbornly failing to bounce back, or is it just their general unlikeability?
2. What independents are we expecting to see returned this time? Presumably they're going to hold the balance of power, so the variety elected will be quite important.

[EastAnglianLefty]

What's happening with the Social Democrats and the far-left? It seems like the latter has fallen back since last time; is this a consequence of the economy being a bit better or is it self-inflicted? And are the former building an identity besides being Labour but even more middle-class and a little less keen on austerity?

[EastAnglianLefty]

That looks very much like a FG-FF grand coalition, supported by the Greens if they're dumb enough, or Labour and some independents if not.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Also, if SF is pulling 25% of the vote, transfers matter less as they're closer to achieving a quota on first preferences anyway.

Arguably FG's numbers by that measure are much worse.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Is there likely to be an exit poll?

[EastAnglianLefty]

Do they bother making a seat distribution estimate from the exit poll or do we just assume that it will be proportional?

Not proportional. Sinn Féins percentage of support will not be reflected in the number of seats, purely because it has not run enough candidates. Running only 42 candidates has knee capped them. In order to match that they need to have a conversion rate of 83%.

On these figures, if it had run a second candidate in Dublin South Central, Dublin Central, Dublin South West, Dublin Bay North and Cork North Central etc. it would have likely taken a second seat there. Conventional Wisdom also suggests that SF is going to get screwed over due to the fact that they traditionally do net get 2nd preferences to the scale that the other ones do, although I am actually sceptical whether that is going to play out this time, at least not to the same extent it did previously. (M.L. McDonald is not Gerry Adams and whatever toxic image SF had among the older electorate, FF and to a lesser extent FG now have among the young.)
On the other hand FF/FG have done their absolute best to piss away any potential SF transfers, so expect the smaller left parties to do better then the 1pf voteshare might imply.

If the smaller parties do get most of their TDs elected on SF surpluses, it'll be interesting to see to what extent that influences how they deal with FF/FG. Cosying up to them too much may mean that they get screwed even more than the smaller partner in a coalition normally does.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The sense I'm getting from reports of tallies is that Labour aren't doing that well out of SF transfers and with FG mostly not having surpluses to pass on that could be very bad for them. If they end up finishing behind the SDs then that would be an absolute humiliation for them.

[EastAnglianLefty]

He's running well ahead of his running mate so he'll probably just about sneak home, but well beaten by the SD candidate.

[EastAnglianLefty]

In most seats where we've had first preferences declared, SF are up about 10 points and the Greens are up 2 or 3 points - except in the south-east of Dublin, where it's the reverse pattern. Which would tend to indicate that social class is having an influence on these results.

[EastAnglianLefty]

SF surpluses seem to be giving notably high transfers to PBP.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Looking like the final result will be something along the lines of the following:

FF 39
SF 38
FG 36
Greens 11
SD 6
Lab 5
Sol-PBP 5
Indies 20

This would mean no combination of the big three would be large enough, so they'd need either the Greens, a collection of independents or the rotting corpse of Irish Labour to prop them up.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Also seems pretty clear that there aren't going to be any constituencies with 3 TDs from the same party, which hasn't happened for at least 50 years (although to be fair, the only example from the last Dáil is three Independents in Tipperary and SF could have got three in some places if they'd run a full slate.)

[EastAnglianLefty]

Is it still 7 TDs needed to form a group? Presumably more likely that Labour and the SDs team up with a friendly indie than that they work together?

[EastAnglianLefty]

Looking at where SF could have elected extra candidates and treating the cut-off as having at least half a quota spare, here's who probably benefited in each case:

Donegal: Pringle (Ind)
Louth: Labour - at first I thought Nash would have got in anyway off Green transfers, but without SF transfers he would probably have been knocked out before the Greens. In that circumstance, Fitzpatrick might also have been beaten by the Green candidate.
Waterford: Greens
Dublin Bay North: Social Democrats
Dublin North West: FF (the SF vote transferred heavily to Sol-PBP, but there were very strong transfers from FG to FF. It's possible this might have shut out SF from a second seat, depending on how well they managed their vote.)
Dublin Central: Social Democrats
Dublin South Central: Collins (I4C). It's also possible that without SF transfers, the Sol-PBP candidate might have lost out to FF or FG.
Dublin South West: Possibly Murphy (Sol-PBP) would have lost out, but he did fairly well on transfers as far-left candidates go, so it's probably more likely that FF were the beneficiaries here.

There were also a fair amount of seats (the 5-seaters especially) where SF had just under 1.5 quotas. In some cases that might have been enough to see them home, depending on how they did with transfers from left candidates.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The numbers aren't there for a left majority and I can't see a SF + left minority government being tolerated (FG have literally no reason to do so; FF won't gain responsibility points for tolerating it, so how would staying out help?) A FG-SF coalition is absolutely off the cards.

So that means FF are going to be in government and it would be a surprise if Martin doesn't end up as the Taoiseach.

[EastAnglianLefty]

So it sounds like right now Ireland is about to get their own little taste of Israeli politics. FG is flipping off everyone and saying "you sort it out," SF discovered that the math forces two of the big three to work together as their small party discussions collapsed, and FF insiders have serious problems with SF. So you get a Mexican Standoff that will produce new elections, a la Israel or Spain. The only difference of course is that all parties can adjust the number of candidates they run to tilt the math potentially in their favor.

... though it isn't entirely clear that SF running more candidates would make that much difference to whether coalitions are viable, as extra SF seats would have mostly come from the smaller parties and independents who are relatively happy to work with them, not from FF and FG.

I would presume a second election would revolve heavily around the question of who would and wouldn't work with who. Which is a bit of a problem, given that you'd only get a second referendum if FF and FG can't work out a coalition.

Also, if SF did run extra candidates, that might somewhat mitigate the smaller parties' seat losses, as in the constituencies where they wouldn't be able to elect an extra candidate it's still likely they'd transfer heavily to non-FF and non-FG candidates. Which probably means fewer Trot TDs but more Greens.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Presumably it also matters to some extent which FF TDs get elected, because some are a lot more hostile to SF than others. That probably has the potential to cause quite a bit of chaos, especially where there are two candidates standing but potentially only the votes for one to get elected.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Doesn't make too much difference. FF are refusing to work with SF, so whilst McDonald is talking to the indies and the smaller parties, the numbers probably aren't there.

On the flipside, FG have now agreed to meet with FF, but they still seem committed to doing the absolute minimum that they can get away with in terms of engagement.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Looks like a FF/FG deal is now on the cards: https://www.rte.ie/news/politics/2020/0311/1121563-politics/

[EastAnglianLefty]

They'd like to get the Greens on board, but it's unclear whether the Green membership are dumb enough to fall for that again. Failing that, there are enough independents from the FF and FG gene pools to get them to 80.

Certainly it's the only remotely stable government that looks plausible with this Dáil, although it probably also guarantees SF will get at least 30% of the vote next time.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Because neither FF nor FG have any interest in fixing the housing crisis or making any substantial changes to current government policy, so the electorate isn't going to get any less pissed off.

Also, a FF-FG coalition does make it even more difficult to insist that they're actually meaningfully different parties from each other, which means both will probably struggle to keep all their current support in the tent.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The Green Party's TDs have voted to enter formal government formation discussions with FG and FF: https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0503/1136300-green-party-discussions-government/

This is the easy bit, though. Getting the membership to sign off on a deal would be much more difficult.