With a week to go before the general election, and faced with some very stark polling data, Fine Gael realised it would have to drastically alter its campaign strategy in order to avoid meltdown.
With its poll numbers already having plummeted from 32 per cent to 20 per cent – and with no sign of the decline halting – Fine Gael decided that desperate times called for a desperate remedy.
And so the message changed to a simple one that has been a staple of so many election campaigns here and elsewhere over the decades – instilling the fear of God in its own base about the prospects of others taking power.
The message was blunt: vote Fine Gael because if you don’t you will end up with a coalition of Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin in government. The party and all its spokespeople repeated the line ad infinitum last week on every conceivable medium. Leo Varadkar even coined a phrase for the possible union of its rivals: “double trouble”.
Fine Gael shored up its numbers in the last week and prevented a bad election from becoming a disastrous one. It was a little like Longford or Westmeath in a Leinster final against Dublin in recent years – knowing the game was not winnable but trying to ensure the scoreboard left it with a modicum of respectability.
As a party coming out of government, Fine Gael had to stand on its record. It argued that no other party could navigate the State as adroitly through the turbulent waters that lay ahead – in terms of Brexit trade negotiations and a possible economic downturn. It emphasised the experience of its team – Varadkar, Simon Coveney and Helen McEntee.
Badly timed
If the Government had called a snap election last October or November, Brexit could have been a very attractive selling point, given that the parties of the left were in relative disarray and Varadkar was enjoying the afterglow of the deal he had forged with Boris Johnson.
By January the praise had been spent and the Government was facing criticism on domestic fronts.
And very quickly it transpired that the general election would be more than a binary choice between Varadkar and Fianna Fáil’s Micheál Martin as taoiseach. A third force was on the rise.
Sinn Féin’s cause was helped – ironically – by the Dublin and London governments forcing the Stormont Executive back into business after a three-year hiatus. If the North was still stuck in political limbo, Sinn Féin would have been vulnerable to criticism that when given power, it was incapable of governing. The agreement forged in early January took away this possible line of attack.
With the Dáil numbers as they were, it would have been very hard for the Government to continue. But still, within days of announcing an early winter election, its problematic nature was evident.
And while Fine Gael wanted to make it an election over economic and diplomatic competence (especially around Brexit), the electorate had other ideas. It wanted change, and Fine Gael wanted a third successive term in office. The emergence of health and housing, which had caused difficulties for Fine Gael in government, as two of the key election issues also did not help.
Painful reminders
As the campaign started, there were painful reminders: a particularly acute hospital trolley crisis and a terrible incident where a homeless man suffered injuries during an operation to remove tents from the Grand Canal. With the other parties continuously portraying the problems with housing and health as intractable and ongoing (and with Ministers Simon Harris and Eoghan Murphy being somewhat shielded from public appearances) it put Fine Gael on the back foot.
When the scale of the threat posed by Sinn Féin became apparent, Fine Gael attacked its policies. But it quickly realised the space it needed to fight for was the ground in which it and Fianna Fáil were vying – an older and more conservative section of the electorate that was wary of Sinn Féin being on the rise.
The rearguard action was effective and saw Fine Gael salvage some of seats, particularly in Dublin. Although it lost others elsewhere, including in the capital, a gain looked possible in Dublin Rathdown, which would have helped avoid a total calamity in Dublin.
Thus, while it may end up with fewer seats than Fianna Fáil, the consequences are not as calamitous for it. Varadkar should be re-elected as leader of Fine Gael, and few in his party will quibble with his stance opposing any talks with Sinn Féin.
That said, Coveney’s view that confidence and supply was detrimental to both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – and that Fine Gael should not consider it in future – is likely to hold sway.
