Back in 2011, as the political effects of the Great Recession were just beginning to appear, Peter Mair wrote about an emerging divide in European party systems between ‘parties which claim to represent, but don’t deliver, and those which deliver, but are no longer seen to represent.’ For Mair, ‘the growing gap between responsiveness and responsibility – or between what citizens might like governments to do and what governments are obliged to do – and the declining capacity of parties to bridge or manage that gap, lies at the heart of the disaffection and malaise that now suffuses democracy.’ He discussed the state of Irish politics in the wake of the 2008 crash as a paradigmatic illustration of this trend.

Sinn Féin made a sustained effort to bridge the gap between representation and delivery after its great leap forward in Ireland’s 2020 general election, when it became the country’s most popular party with one quarter of the vote. Its leaders worked assiduously to present themselves to the electorate as being ready to govern with an achievable programme, while reaching out more discreetly to business circles in Ireland and the US, aiming to defuse hostility to their reform agenda. This time last year, the party still seemed on course to surpass its conservative rivals, the incumbent coalition partners Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, by a wide margin; its average polling score in 2023 was 32%, only slightly lower than its 2022 average of 34%.

If Sinn Féin had maintained this level of support in last week’s election, its path to power would still have been uncertain: the numbers might not have been there for a left-leaning coalition that excluded both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and there would have been no clear incentive for one of the centre-right parties to swap the grand-coalition deal of the past few years for a junior partnership with Sinn Féin. By the time the election was called, however, such considerations were already moot. After a sharp drop in the polls since the beginning of the year, Sinn Féin was forced to scale back its ambitions, hoping simply to maintain its position from 2020.

In the end, Sinn Féin’s share of the first-preference vote dropped by more than 5%, although it won two more seats than last time. In several Dublin constituencies, including the inner-city base of party leader Mary Lou McDonald, there was a double-digit fall in support. But nor was there any surge of enthusiasm for the ruling conservative bloc. Earlier in the year, Fine Gael looked as if it might pull ahead of the pack, but its leader Simon Harris ran a poor campaign. While his campaign posters promised ‘new energy’, the news cameras showed him talking down to members of the public and blithely dismissing a care worker who questioned him about poverty wages. The combined vote for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil was lower than it had been in 2020, which was already by far the worst performance in their collective history.

None of this could dispel the sense of jubilation in the political establishment, though, as Sinn Féin’s governmental ambitions fizzled out. The polling attrition suffered by Sinn Féin during the middle part of the year strongly influenced the nature of the campaign. With no real sense that the government parties might be ejected from power, the election was a low-energy affair, with turnout dropping below 60% for the first time in the history of the state. The final debate between the three main leaders – Harris, McDonald, and Fianna Fáil’s Michéal Martin – did not generate as many sparks as we might have expected if the stakes were higher. Instead of presenting Sinn Féin as a threat to democracy or the institutions of the state, Martin accused the party of failing to appreciate Ireland’s ‘enterprise economy’.

The exit poll on Friday night indicated that Sinn Féin had come first, albeit with fewer votes than in 2020, which would have been a morale-booster for the party after a difficult year. But the figures turned out to be wrong beyond the margin of error: Sinn Féin ended up with 19%, against 21.9% for Fianna Fáil and 20.8% for Fine Gael. The polling company put the discrepancy down to an unexpectedly low turnout. This was an outcome that Harris had consciously sought, calling the election at short notice a few months ahead of schedule and in the depths of winter. He and Martin aimed their pitch squarely at those who had voted for them in 2020 instead of seeking to win over Sinn Féin’s younger, poorer electorate. People who owned their homes outright or with mortgages were far more likely to trust Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil over housing policy than private or social renters.

There was a reshuffling of the pack in the centre-left political space. In 2020, the Green Party, Labour and the Social Democrats took 14.4% of the vote and 24 seats; this time, their combined vote share dropped to 12.5%, with one fewer seat. Within this cohort, the Greens were virtually wiped out after their time in government, losing 11 of their 12 seats. Labour barely improved on its 2020 vote – the party’s worst-ever performance – but added 5 seats for a total of 11; the Social Democrats enjoyed a more substantial increase, pulling just ahead of Labour in terms of votes while also going from 6 to 11 seats.

Since 2007, there have been three cases of a centre-left party forming a junior partnership with Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, or both. On every occasion, the result has been a collapse in support: for the Greens in 2011, Labour in 2016 and now the Greens once again. Against this backdrop, many commentators nonetheless continue with their bizarre insistence that these smaller parties will never be forgiven by their voters unless they shoulder the responsibility of propping up the old guard. In any case, though, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael now have the parliamentary numbers to strike a deal with right-leaning independents. Having already chewed up the Greens and spat them out, they may see no reason to do the same with Labour or the Social Democrats.

Ireland’s Trotskyist groups, People Before Profit and Solidarity, maintained their foothold in national politics: they slightly increased their national vote to just under 3% but went from 5 to 3 seats, with three losses offset by one gain. Some independent TDs firmly to the left of Sinn Féin also lost their seats – Joan Collins in Dublin, Thomas Pringle in Donegal – although Catherine Connolly held on in Galway and Seamus Healy regained his former seat in Tipperary. Some of these losses were marginal, going down to the last count, but the overall trajectory in left-wing strongholds since the middle of the last decade was down. Dublin South Central elected two socialist TDs with one quarter of the vote in 2016; this time, it elected none, the share of first preferences having fallen to 17%.

This downward trend was not surprising under the circumstances. The radical left depends far more than the centre-left parties on the energy generated by social activism, and the first half of the decade has not produced any movements comparable in size and impact to those of the 2010s. Right-wing forces have dominated the terrain of street politics in recent years, mobilizing first against the pandemic lockdowns, then against emergency accommodation for refugees. Palestine is a notable exception, with a year of demonstrations much bigger than any called by the opponents of immigration. But the solidarity movement did not have the same impact on the electoral front that we saw earlier this year in Britain: unlike Keir Starmer’s Labour, the governing parties in Dublin have been careful to publicly distance themselves from the carnage in Gaza, without doing anything that would compromise relations with enthusiastic warmongers like Joe Biden and Ursula von der Leyen.

This background of demobilization helps explain why support for Sinn Féin proved to be so brittle over the past year. Although the party let others take the initiative in the movement against water charges and the campaign for abortion rights, it nonetheless benefited from the atmosphere that their victories created. Those memories were already starting to fade by 2020. Sinn Féin itself experienced a spike in membership following the election, but on a much smaller scale than the Scottish National Party in the aftermath of the 2014 independence referendum. A party that lacks organizational ballast is more likely to be disturbed by sudden political waves.

This brings us to the most obvious factor behind Sinn Féin’s polling decline: the heightened focus on immigration since the end of 2022, when protests against housing for refugees in Dublin’s north inner city began spreading to other parts of the country. This ominous shift was by no means a spontaneous or inexorable reaction to the latest immigration figures. If there had been a deliberate, high-level strategy to generate a sense of crisis around the issue and drive a wedge through Sinn Féin’s electoral base, it is hard to see how the government and other state bodies would have behaved any differently.

First the authorities began announcing haphazard plans for accommodation in vacant buildings without doing any preparatory groundwork, leaving a vacuum that could be filled with xenophobic scaremongering; then the Gardaí, Ireland’s police force, gave far-right agitators the run of the streets as they broke the law and engaged in various acts of violence, enjoying a degree of latitude that would have been unthinkable for a protest movement led by socialists or republicans. This is the point at which self-consciously sensible folk would say that we should always choose cock-up over conspiracy as an explanation for such matters. But cock-ups usually go through a process of natural selection, weeding out the varieties that produce fewer political off-spring for those in power. The hands-off approach to the far right, which continued after a full-scale riot in Dublin’s city centre, is a matter of public record, acknowledged by the police themselves, and there is little doubt that the force would have come under intense pressure to change direction much sooner were such disturbances causing as much political damage to the government parties as they were to Sinn Féin.

While all this was unfolding, Sinn Féin kept its head down and hoped it would blow over. From the end of 2023, however, there was a clear shift towards a more hawkish and restrictive line on immigration. After a dire performance in June’s local and European elections, with Sinn Féin trailing far behind Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, the party leadership doubled down on this rightward turn. This initial hesitancy and subsequent lurch made Sinn Féin look weak, indecisive and easily buffeted. While Sinn Féin has not yet plumbed the same depths over the issue as Europe’s centre-left parties, from Britain to Denmark, its approach thus far has been to go with the flow instead of staking out a clear position of its own.

This counterproductive aversion to risk-taking reflects Sinn Féin’s general modus operandi since the last election, which has several European precedents from the past decade or so. If we look at Syriza after 2012, the SNP after 2014–15, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership after 2017 and now Sinn Féin after 2020, we can see a recurring pattern: a radical political force makes an unexpected breakthrough and then adopts a more cautious and conventional approach, seeking to present itself as a government-in-waiting (or in the case of Scotland, a state-in-waiting). Of course, this is exactly what the standard playbook would have told them to do in this situation. But the very same playbook would also have declared their initial advances to be inconceivable. In every case, we can now say that this approach simply did not work on its own terms. While the left-populist wave of the 2010s may now seem rather distant, we still have much to learn from the unconventional, insurgent politics associated with its high points.

Read on: Daniel Finn, ‘Challenge from the Peripheries’, NLR 135.