Ireland’s election has produced a parliament full of feuding factions and no obvious road to a majority government, spurring lawmakers on Sunday to warn that the country could face a protracted political deadlock followed by a second election.
For the first time in Irish electoral history, the combined popular vote on Friday for Ireland’s two political heavyweights — the Fianna Fail and Fine Gael parties — fell below 50 percent as voters infuriated by austerity measures shifted their support to a Babel of anti-government voices.
The results left parliament with at least nine factions and a legion of loose-cannon independents, few of them easy partners for a coalition government, none of them numerous enough to make a difference on their own.
Photo: EPA
“There’s a sense of bewilderment, first of all. We’re a long way from sitting down together and talking about what our next options are,” Fine Gael lawmaker Regina Doherty said.
With 12 seats in Ireland’s 158-member parliament still to be filled, ruling Fine Gael won 46 seats, long-time foe Fianna Fail 42, Irish nationalist Sinn Fein 22 and junior government partner Labour just six. An eye-popping array of tiny parties, umbrella groups and parochial mavericks won the rest.
Leading members of Fianna Fail — which rebounded in this vote just five years after facing electoral ruin for nearly bankrupting the country — said they would find it extremely hard to forge any coalition that keeps Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny’s Fine Gael in power.
“I’ve just fought a difficult three-week campaign during which people said to me they want rid of this government, they don’t want Enda Kenny as taoiseach anymore,” Fianna Fail lawmaker Willie O’Dea said, using the formal Gaelic title for Ireland’s premier. “Our supporting a Fine Gael government would be doing exactly what we told our voters we wouldn’t do.”
The trouble is, Ireland’s voters have never produced a parliament like this before and there is no third party strong enough to give Fianna Fail or Fine Gael a parliamentary majority of at least 79 seats. Both parties have ruled out working with Sinn Fein, the only party that could get either of them close.
When the new parliament convenes on March 10 to elect a prime minister to appoint a government, both Kenny and Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin have said that they would put themselves forward as rival candidates.
Failure to create a new government would mean Kenny’s five-year coalition with Labour continues indefinitely in a lame-duck caretaker role.
Leading lawmakers in both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael said they cannot see how two parties so long committed to tearing each other down can form a united cabinet that survives for months, never mind five years. The two parties evolved from opposite sides of the civil war that followed Ireland’s 1922 independence from Britain. Between them, they have led every Irish government over the past nine decades but have never shared power.
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