Ireland's Palestine stance was good electoral politics for its establishment parties

For much of the past 18 months, Ireland ’s coalition government has been at the forefront of European efforts to show support for Palestinians. Although this stance was made real by international diplomacy, the results of the Irish election just gone by demonstrate that it was good politics for the country’s pop parties as well. Foreign Minister Micheal Martin will lead Fianna Fail into the new parliament as the biggest party. The Fine Gael party of Taoiseach, or Prime Minister, Simon Harris came second in the popular vote. This left both the radical republicans of Sinn Fein and a hotly tipped wave of independents as underperformers who suffered a disappointing campaign. Under the Irish electoral system, winning votes are painstakingly assembled through lowest-ranked candidate eliminations that then recycle preferences back to remaining contenders. All winners then triumph in the aggregate, which means it is probably unwise to embrace antagonistic and divisive campaign strategies, although there are sometimes exceptions. That is why the approach of the main parties to Gaza, and Palestine more generally, was so important. They took an issue where there was strong popular opinion at home and kept a spirit of unity behind their policies. That means there has been no backlash against their candidates. To have knowingly risked a boycott of a mainstream party would, in terms of the electoral system, be self-defeating. Contrast that with the Labour Party in the UK, which risked a negative vote in the run-up to the July general election there. The handful of seats won by candidates on a pro-Gaza platform sent some shudders through the Labour leadership but not enough to materially affect its stance or indeed its overwhelming majority for the next five years. The same was not true in Ireland’s very different political landscape. The work the country has done with Spain to advance recognition of a Palestinian state stood Ireland’s main governing parties in good stead when it came to the election. The future agenda item of reviewing trade with Israel, especially targeting economic activity coming out of the occupied West Bank, will be a top priority for the new government when it is formed. The campaign over the past month was an example to the world that the events in Gaza, Palestine more broadly and Lebanon do not have to cleave an enormous division in western politics. All it takes is political leadership that seeks to stay in tune with the electorate and a willingness to show empathy, not just among the population that is motivated to donate to charity appeals in the corridors of power at national and EU level. To the outside world, Ireland’s centre-right parties of government held off insurgent challenges and renewed their mandate for power. The reality is these labels are not quite right. What detractors on social media call “FFG” (Fianna Fail/Fine Gael) are not very much informed by conservative politics, even though they represent much of the middle class and wealthy. They both offer to run and cautiously expand a welfarist state. I say “cautiously” because the stability shocks of running up high debts have seen Ireland regularly find itself in trouble, most recently after the 2008 global financial crash. Only in foreign investment, on which Ireland is critically dependent, does the country offer a light-touch, deregulated economy. Nonetheless, the image of being parties of the right has done the big two very well over the years; it has meant there has not been space for the development of an outwardly conservative party. The last big example of an effort to break the mould of Irish politics from a smaller-state and lighter-taxes direction was the Progressive Democrats, a one-time coalition junior party that disappeared two decades ago. This contrasts with a lingering leftist element outside of Sinn Fein that includes the Social Democrats as well as the Labour Party, which has trade union roots. These two parties did quite well at the weekend and could replace the Greens as the third leg of the new government. The absence of the far-right in the Irish parliament is marked because the headlines in recent years have suggested a grassroots spread of harder sympathies. The arrival in the country of more than 100,000 Ukrainians alongside a surge in a similar type of illegal immigration that has toxified British politics was predicted to show up in the Irish election. This election race even included an alleged gangster who promised change that would challenge the government. Even though Gerry Hutch conducted himself with big-man swagger, he failed to get the support of his local streets at the ballot box. Nor did the more overtly anti-immigrant tickets make any breakthroughs. Punditry predicting that Ireland would fall for the type of politics seen on the march across Europe was wrong. For Mr Martin, who will again become Taoiseach after holding a rotating turn at the job in the last parliament, the task is to maintain his careful balancing act. Not least because Ireland could find its economy very challenged by the tariff policies and political outlook of US president-elect Donald Trump, who will return to the White House in January.