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The Green Collapse – Quick Note
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In Dublin the Greens were wiped off the map in the local elections. The result truly was horrific. There is no way to hide the fact that support for the party collapsed – pretty much dropped by about 50%.
But I noticed two things that I think were relevant in the decline.
First is the change in the local election constituency boundaries and seat numbers. A small party like the Greens – whose share of the vote even at its best was around 4% to 5% – always depends heavily on the PR system working to a maximum proportionality. In effect this means that a larger number of seats suits it better because the trickle of vote transfers can be enough to push a Green candidate across the line after the bigger parties have scooped the first few seats. After the 2008 review of local boundaries a number of local areas in Dublin were reduced from 6 seaters to 5. An example is Dundrum – which was a six seater and is now a five seater.
That was bad enough – but in this ward the Green sitting councillor retired only months before the election and his co-opted and simply hadn’t the time to build up a profile. The Ballybrack ward – where Green councillor Tom Kivlehan lost his seat was also reduced from a six to five seater.
The second factor which appears to be significant is that the People Before Profit party scooped two seats where the Greens had councillors. And you can see massive drops in Green first preference votes in areas where this time the PBP did well (and where last time, 2004 they only did so-so and failed to get elected). It seems to me that Richard Boyd Barret’s performance in the 2007 general where he nearly picked up a seat in Dun Laoghaire succeeded in raising his profile – something which he has successfully worked on since and I think it’s fair to say that he would now be fairly widely known in the Dublin electoral areas.
It would seem then that Greens were picking up a left wing, anti-establishment vote. This wouldn’t have been their ‘core’ vote – people who believed in sustainable living or Green economics as such – but people who wanted some kind of alternative to the major status quo parties. With the Greens in government, and given the kind of tough economic policies which they felt they had to back, it was hard to sustain an anti-establishment image. And the natural destination for these sentiments was the PBP party.
John Gormely has said that the party will bounce back because the Green idea is sound and ideas don’t die. The real trouble for him is that other parties have long become aware that there is a certain sympathy for Green policies and so they have managed to wrap themselves in Green rhetoric (think Cameron in Britain). And apart from the optics probably a certain amount of the Green idea has genuinely seeped into the mindsets of other political parties.This may be enough to ease the consciences of ordinary middle class voters with Green sympathies (but who aren’t really committed environmentalists).
So the Greens are losing the floating ‘Green minded’ voter and have pretty clearly lost the anti-establishment vote, leaving them reliant on a very tiny core of committed supporters, a minuscule group which is simply not large enough to push Green candidates across the line, especially where the number of seats is reduced to less than 6 – which is most places.
Not a bright picture for the Greens if this theory is correct and is valid for a General election as well.
An excellent analysis, Tomaltach
If the Green agenda (sustainable living, energy alternatives, and – most importantly for Ireland – reform of local government) is realised, then that implies that the rationale for the existence of the Greens as a political movement ceases to exist. Ironically, the more successful the party is, the more it will contribute to its own decline. Anybody who is truly ‘green’ understands this ….
Tomaltach,
You make a number of very important points, not least about the reduction in the number of seats per constituency and the impact this has on representation by smaller parties. The trend towards increasing the numbers of 3 seat constituencies for Dail elections makes it harder for smaller parties to get elected. Once upon a time, there were Dail constituencies returning six or seven members and the PR system worked to ensure greater proportionality in representation, as it is intended to do, and which was more reflective of public opinion on the merits or demerits of parties and individual candidates.
The system is meant to work for the electorate’s benefit, not the benefit of individual parties. I don’t think this is sufficiently strong in the mandate given to the various electoral commissions who have regularly reviewed constituency boundaries and there should be more public debate about it. Either that, or we might as well get rid of PR STV altogether and introduce a hybrid of it or a first past the post system instead.
Before entering government the Greens were a party of protest, with strong connections to a variety of community-based movements seeking power over decisions that affected their community and local environment e.g. the Tara and the Shell to Sea groups. In previous electoral contests the Green provided a magnet for protest votes, especially from young first time voters. Going into government inevitably changes that and a large element of that protest vote will drift elsewhere – the rise in the People before Profit group is an example of that. To be honest, I don’t think that the personal profile of any particular individual is the core reason for the transfer of voting allegiance, although it is a factor in it. Nobody had hardly heard of Patricia Mc Kenna before she contested – and won – her first Dublin European Election.
In a general election the electorate may prefer to cast their preferences for parties that they believe can take on the responsibility of government and see it through. Whether the election is in 2010 or 2012, we will still have massive unemployment and very serious economic challenges, as well as a fair degree of social misery and loss of living standards particularly among those who will have lost their jobs.
The Green Party made a calculation in 2007 that going into government with Fianna Fail would allow them to place green policies at the heart of the government agenda – a once in a lifetime opportunity for a party that wasn’t really going anywhere in electoral terms and pushing a open door to get the portfolios they wanted from a Taoiseach whose authoritiy was already diminished because of the malodorous whiff attaching to his personal finances and other issues. It was a shrewd calculation on the part of the Green leadership(and ultimately the party members) to take the plunge, which inevitably meant the loss of the protest element in their politics. If government worked for the Greens then going in with FF also represented an opportunity to attract new voters to the party from the established parties, especially the more liberal wing of Fine Gael and also the Labour Party. That might indeed have been the outcome if the economy hadn’t run into a brick wall in the meantime. That opportunity still exists, which is the measure of the challenge that faces Gormley and Ryan and Sargent and their supporters.
I saw John Gormley on Q&A on Monday night and he was impressive – he showed dignity, humour and courage, which is a lot more than can be said for some of the other participants on the panel! At least when he says the interests of the country must come before party interests you can believe him because it’s so patently obvious that he believes it himself. If he can hold his party together – which will be difficult – and if they can stay the course in trying to steer the country through these difficult times in an honest and responsible way and, of course, if they can get some of their own policy objectives achieved in the process, then good luck to them. I believe people will respect them more when the next general election comes than if they had cut and run when the going got really tough. But they should not expect gratitude from the electorate – as the saying goes, if you want gratitude, go and buy a dog. They will have to be able to make the case that they will make a strong and useful partner to FG as to FF, or any other combination of parties that may form the next government, because they are good at doing the business of government and because they have achieved useful things even in the face of overwhelming obstacles like the economic crisis.
Meanwhile, deploying some of that old campaigning experience might come in useful in getting their message across to the public in constituencies they want to win whenever the general election takes place, whether it’s twelve months or three years away.
I agree wholeheartedly, Veronica.
Veronica, I would agree on the positive points which remain for the Greens – staying the course, and credibility in terms of not being so party centric (let’s see how that goes now). But yes, for the Greens all is not lost.
There is one other aspect which I should mention in explaining their poor performance. It’s the issue of relative decline – the comparisons so far were with their local election performance of 2004, i.e. the number of councillors, or looking at their % of the vote from 2007.
In some ways their performance in 2007 was respectable enough : they returned 6 deputies. But that was somewhat below the expectations which they had in the air earlier that year. The Stern report was issued late 2006 and the IPCC made a crucial report early 2007. Both of these got huge attention at the time and the issue of climate change and sustainability had never been higher. The Greens had dreamt of getting close to 10 seats on a good day out in 2007 (this was before the election cycle began proper and polls began to show a more prosaic reality).
In the end the 6 deputies represented no change from 2002 if I’m correct. At a time when the economy was still not huge on the radar (and there was no hint of the extent of the huge international crisis) and with Climate change all the rage, the Greens still effetively plateau’d.
I wonder if they had simply reached the barrier of how far people were willing to go in terms of how highly they ranked long term sustainability over short term prosperity (there is a certain trade off, that’s the whole point). If they had reached some kind of limit, then it is no surprise that when the economy went into a tail spin, the issues of sustainability, climate change, and environment, dropped down the list of priorities pretty spectacularly. That is not to say Green voters necessarily saw the other big parties as economic saviours. Obviously not. But it may have caused many of them to drift into the arms of other anti-establishment parties like PBP or simply to go for the more plain ‘left of centre’ politics of labour.
Tomaltach,
One general point about the mid-term results is, I think, that the real political gains of both FG and Labour are being overstated. Of course their respective spokespersons are going to do that: they’re politicians; that’s their job. But much of their triumphalism is misplaced since their success derives from the collapse of public confidence in the capability of Brian Cowen’s current team to bring us through this crisis and deep disappointment in his personal performance as Taoiseach. The Green Party, in government, despite the respect that many voters may have for them, have suffered collateral damage; contamination by association.
So FG may be ten points up and Labour about five; but they have not, as the old political cliche goes, closed the deal with the electorate by any means. Not yet, anyway.
Your point about climate change and the 2007 election illustrates that you can’t sell idealism on the doorsteps. In every election, people vote with short term considerations in mind. In a GE, we’re picking a Taoiseach and smaller parties, like the Greens, may find themselves taking two steps forward in opinion polls before the contest only to find themselves taking one step back when the voter makes his/her choice in the polling booth. In other words: “I may have sympathy with your ideals, but meantime I have a life to be getting on with and bills to pay.” That’s in the good times; in hard times all the long term policy issues, as you point out, slip further below the radar of electoral priorities.
One of those nice clever academics in TCD has recently worked out that there is no longer such a thing as ‘party loyalty’ in voting patterns to any great extent; that the floating vote which only a few years ago was calculated at about 20% and utterly non-transferable between FF and FG, is now at about 50% and transferable between all parties and candidates. Performance, and being able to demonstrate achievement, is what will make the difference between keeping their seats or political oblivion for the Greens in the next GE.
The Greens need a coherent economic narrative for their policies. Right now, they don’t have one beyond making naively exaggerated claims for ‘green jobs’ and a ‘green economy’ as the only way forward for us and ridiculous rhetoric about Ireland becoming a ‘world leader’ in some or other unproven technological field of green enterprise. When I was down in Co. Clare over the Bank Holiday weekend, I was privileged to talk to some of the farmers involved in the Mount Callan wind farm project. The hype in the media was far removed from what they were saying, which involved a far more down to earth and realistic appraisal of the likely success of this project, the difficulties that will be encountered in terms of ecological impact, the planning problems ahead, the relatively modest potential contribution to energy supply in the local area etc. They were very enthusiastic, but refreshingly realistic and level headed about what they are facing into. Belief in the potential of something is not a substitute for a realistic appraisal of that potential and I think the Green Party might usefully take a leaf out of the Mount Callan farmers’ book in that respect when they start talking about their green economy ideas.
In short, they need to hire in some economic expertise. Next they need to listen to it and after that they need to be selective – just because some group or other claims they can fulfil the country’s energy needs within five years through some cockamamy ischeme or other doesn’t automatically mean that any Green Party Minister should automatically publicly support it. In fact, they will have far greater credibility if they weed out the chancers and insist that all proposals put before them are subject to proper justification processes.
One of the benefits to the country of having the Green Party in government is that their world view is distinct from that of any other major or small political party. It is also a world view – that all the earth’s systems are interconnected and natural resources are there to be used sustainably, not squandered simply for the short term benefit of our own species – that is steadily gaining traction amongst the general population. So if I were advising them I think I’d be saying to empahsise that difference and forget about Stern and Al Gore and the IPCC and ideological arguments between the eco-fundamentalists and the climate change deniers or lofty visions of Ireland’s carbon-free world leadership. Pick two or three things that they can achieve while in government in the next two years or so; that they can realistically claim set us on a more sustainable growth path for the medium to long term future and that also make sense in our current economic circumstances, and go for them. Then whenever the election comes, they can look to be judged on that performance and that delivery.
Put’s the Libertas failure in perspective. They won double the Green vote.
Tomaltach,
A lot to agree with in your analysis, but some quick points
The idea of the Greens cloth being stolen is an old one. When the Dept of Environment was established, when the EPA was established etc the commentators stated the the ‘environmental agenda’ had been worked into the political mainstream – they were wrong on every occasion. The fact is any political Party can put together a policy document and state their Green credentials, but it is whether or not they prioritise these issues that is important. For example if you contrast the Socialists in the EP with the Greens, you see a long record of the former voting against environmental regulation for spurious reasons. Labour’s Joanna Tuffy has been a constant critique of Environmental measures adopted by this government, and FG/FF continue to engage in dodgy planning decisions.
If you look at the model of how Irish Parties operate, we see FF, FG and Labour moving away from grassroots democracy and towards centralised control – this was one of the key reasons the Green Party were established.
Your thoughts on Greens suffering from the voters giving a higher priority to economic issues over environmental ones is confined only to the Republic of Ireland. In the North the Green vote trebled, in Britain it increased 33%, Greece elected its first Green MEP and in France the Green Party almost overtook the Socialists. Simply put, your thesis doesn’t comply with the facts.
FT – Libertas focused solely on the European elections and had a wad of cash, with their lead candidate (Ganley) received far more coverage than the Greens lead candidate (de Burca).
The Greens focused more of their effort on the local elections – not that it paid off much
Good analysis but to me it seems much simpler. This is exactly what happened to Labour after the Spring tide. You don’t get to campaign against FF and then turn around and put them into government. The voters have taken their revenge for being lied to.
Technically Sargeant told the truth by resigning the leadership but in every other respect the Greens lied. They raged against FF, and thus attracted that middle class liberal anti-FF vote which also hates FG. Then the Greens put FF back in power! Anyone who is angry at the government IS going to take this out on the Greens because they are the ones that put them there! Its not the smaller party being unfairly punished – its the smaller party being punished for that fatal decision.
As for the shift to PBP – I wouldn’t dwell too much on that – its easy for middle class people to vote for a kinda-revolutionary party when they are still just a symbol of protest rather than an actual threat to the establishment. The same people who thought it was cool to vote Sinn Fein 5 years ago but who seemed to have disappeared once there was a danger that they might actually get into government. One Joe Higgins is seen as worthy but harmless. A Dail full of real socialists? I just don’t buy that we’re ready to move remotely towards that.
btw, this does not mean that i am anti the left – just that predictions of its rise have been heard before.
The Greens are done. They were cute on the side lines for the posh liberals. But their day is over. Which is a pity. They should have spurned FF rather than being naive to believe that there would be any alternative to being chewed up and spat out.
Wow, its amazing how some just want to repeat lies in the hope that they turn into reality.
The Greens did not return FF to power, the voters did. FF had 77 votes, with the PDs adding 2 and Ind adding 4 – that equaled the 83 votes needed for Ahern to be re-elected. Where exactly did the Greens reinstate FF to power in this equation? The only thing we did was get Dick Roche out of the Dept of Environment – which frankly we don’t get enough thanks for.
As for lies – we did not lie, and I suggest you withdraw that. The Greens never ruled out coalition with FF for the simple reason that it would give the impression that there was a distinction between FF and FG. There isn’t – FG Cllrs made dodgy rezoning decisions, FG TDs bankrolled their campaigns with cash from builders and bankers and FG Ministers like Lowry left office in disgrace over their actions. To rule out FF would be to accept the FG are somehow different – they are not.
Your little ‘cute on the side lines’ remark indicates you have a good FG agenda behind you. Everything you state about the Greens should be interpreted in that light.
Sarah,
Your analysis may be ‘simpler’, but if it had any sound basis then those FF ogres would have been driven into the marshes and political oblivion a long time ago. Instead, as Andrew notes, they’ve been busy winning elections.
As for what happened to Labour after the Spring Tide of 1992, their electoral result in 1997 brought them back to their normal general level of political support. The suggestion that in 1997 they failed to hold on to that support, and consolidate it, because they were being punished by the electorate for having put FF back into office five years earlier is overly simplistic. After all, it was FF who won the 1997 election. The main reason they won, by the way, was because of their promise to cut personal taxation levels. Labour, and its Rainbow partners, had restricted themselves to a miserly 1% cut in the higher tax rate.
Labour in government did not live up to expectations; in fact they greatly disappointed both their new and traditional supporters. Yet those most enraged by their decision to enter government with FF were traditional Labour voters who still stuck with the party in 1997. Labour’s performance had disappointed at every level – from their nepotistic appointment of family members and hangers-on to political posts to serious policy errors (especially on taxation policy) and their conspicuous lack of moral and political courage, most pointedly exemplified by the decision to cut and run and allow the media to call the shots in the break up with FF in 1994 and the subsequent formation of the Bruton led Rainbow Coalition. In particular, their king-making behaviour in choosing to install John Bruton as Taoiseach without a general election was a bridge too far for many people and just as heinous an act as their original decision to go into office with Albert Reynolds. The ‘Rainbow Coalition’ was an unpopular government all the way through, despite the emerging signs of economic boom. In short, Labour showed they were just not quite up to the job. They could be anybodys – FF’s or FG’s – provided they got to hang on to the trappings of office. The 1997 verdict on Labour was thus as much a judgement on their performance in Government as anything else.
As well as ignoring political performance in preference to a focus on political personality, the Irish political media commentariat have consistently underestimated the seismic shift in Irish politics that has been underway for decades i.e the growing proportion of the electorate who are ‘floating’ voters and the dissipation of traditional tribal allegiances within Irish politics. Hence the 1992 Spring Tide for Labour, FG’s ignominious fall from grace in 2002, FF’s likely hammering in the next general election and various electoral flirtations with Sinn Fein and colourful Independents that pop up every now and again.
There’s never been a ‘Green Tide’ and now their natural protest vote has gone south as well. The discussion here about how the Greens can protect their position in the next general election is an attempt to tease out what their distinctive political brand is, or should be, and how they might communicate that to potential supporters for the remainder of the life time of this government. Performance is probably key to that, much more so than superficial media perception of how our political order should be structured.
Andrew,
I take your point about Green performance elsewhere. Nevertheless I still believe that in voters minds in Ireland — where the economic downturn has been more traumatic than most places — the economy and jobs pushed environment way down the agenda. You only have to have been reading the papers and hearing about what people were animated about on phone ins or whatever to know that.
The other thing I’d say is that the Green performance in Britain is admirable but a little bit less exciting that your ’33%’. What I mean is that the Greens still only hold 0.7 of one percent of the council seats in Britain. This in a country where the incumbent government is positively loathed and where the expenses scandal tarnished the conservatives pretty much as it did labour.
I wouldn’t want to write off the achievement of the Greens in the UK in how they increased their vote but they did express disappointment at only picking up two EP seats – the same as the BNP. Again not spectacular.
Plus, in terms of the jobs v environment, central to their campaign was creating jobs – albeit green jobs, but I’ll bet that for most voters the fact they were promoting jobs was more important than the fact they might be green jobs.
Andrew, I am sorry, but I can’t accept that – the Green decision is what elected Bertie Taoiseach – its called the balance of power. In 2007 I thought it was more important than ever to get FF out of power because we KNEW what was coming and I for one did not want FF in charge when the crash happened. Since only 40% of people voted for FF that means I was with the 60%.
Trevor Sargeant said that he would rather resign the leadership than go into government with Fianna Fail. That was a pretty clear indication that he was against coalition. It did not lead a casual voter to believe that he would resign the leadership and give the speech of his life persuading his party to enter coalition. That’s the technicality of the truth but the betrayal of the spirit of his claim. I remember during the campaign I met a Green councillor (whom I used to know and I know is a committed environmentalist) and I said “So, are you going to make Bertie Taoiseach?” He replied “Not unless he comes up with an explanation of where he got his money”. Well the explanation did not come. In fact the explanations got more fantastic and incredible. But he still ended up being made Taoiseach and the councillor got a good job in the administration.
Veronica – I agree totally about the existence of that big floating vote – it moves from election to election looking for some hope that something might change but I believe then get let down and so they move on again until they have nowhere to go and end up in a circle – so we get these up and down swings for parties. I think if one party that benefited from it stuck by the voters who gave them a chance then those voters would stick with them. Instead they are consistently let down when the parties put a few years at the trough before principal.
I say all this not because I am “against” particular parties (except FF) but because I too am one of those who hopes and feels betrayed and disappointed by the failure of politicians to stick by their principles. It means I end up with a grudging respect for FF. In one way, they are the only party who tells the truth. They know what they want and they say what they want – power.