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Election 2011: Can Fine Gael go the distance?
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Have Fine Gael peaked or could they go the distance, landing the first parliamentary majority in the history of their party since 1932? Polls in tomorrow’s Sunday Independent and Sunday Business Post will tell a tale; the last pre-election poll in the Irish Times early next week even more.
On Michael Marsh’s ‘poll of polls’, compiled for RTE, Fine Gael are on 34.3%, Labour 22%; FF 16.1%; SF 12.3%; Greens 1.9% and Others 13.7%. Re-weighted by Eoin O’Malley of politicalreform.ie, the estimated support levels are FG 37.1%;; Labour 20.5%; FF 15.7%; SF 10.4%; Greens 2.5% and Others 14.2%.
If replicated in the general election this would result in 65-69 seats for FG; 35-39 Labour; 25-29 FF; 16-20 SF and 15-19 for Greens/Others.
So will the final set of polls before the election change the picture? Unconfirmed reports of tomorrow’s Sunday Independent poll put FG at 37%, down one since the last Millward Brown Independent poll; Labour 20%, down 3; FF 16%, up 4; SF 12% and Others (incl. Greens) at 13%.
If true, what’s important is the trend. For FG it’s neither here nor there, since 1% is meaningless. For Labour and FF it’s significant though, since it implies further seepage in Labour support with FF crawling its way back into the territory of political survival.
Only now in its final few days has the election campaign ignited. For the past two weeks, Fianna Fail have been like a bystander ghost at the feast; invisible to everyone else as well as themselves. The real contest has been between Labour and Fine Gael. A battle of strategy, and one in which Fine Gael gained the upper hand from the outset.
Labour sought to mount a campaign based around a leader ‘personality cult’. Eamon Gilmore is no Obama. What’s more, it’s self-evident that Labour has failed to do its homework in just about every area of policy, but particularly on the economy. They’ve chopped and changed their approach to tax since the election started. They’ve set conditions for renegotiation of the IMF/EU bailout that simply won’t wash. They’ve followed that up with bellicose insults directed at the men who hold the moneybags, attacks that have neither impressed their immediate targets nor anyone else.
In contrast, FG has worked out detailed plans in every important policy area. You may not agree with them. In many respects they may have as many holes in them as a colander. But on the back of them, party spokespersons have been able to deliver coherent political messages, giving rise to a measure of confidence that they might be able to do something in government to fix the mess we’re in, if the electorate give them the chance.
Fine Gael engender confidence in their ability to govern; Labour has only generated confusion.
Throughout the campaign, Fianna Fail has concentrated on winning back enough of a core vote to ensure a sufficient number of FF deputies will survive to provide a base on which to rebuild their party from the opposition benches in the next Dail. They rely on Michael Martin’s media performances – that in other circumstances would be hailed as outshining his opponents by a mile – and on the personal popularity of their incumbents at local level, to try and save enough seats to retain political viability.
When it comes to exploiting the policy differences between Fine Gael and Labour, Fianna Fail hasn’t really had to do very much; since the Labour Party and various hotheads in Fine Gael have been doing that job very nicely themselves. Labour has watched its headline support seep away in one poll after the next. The gap between Labour’s poll ratings and those of Fine Gael have now widened to a point that risks most of the seat gains they’d hoped to make, especially in Dublin. Instead of accepting that the leadership cult idea was a bad one and reshaping their strategy for the rest of the campaign; Labour instead chose to take Fine Gael on, with daft media attacks and even more asinine negative ads in newspapers; and now most stupid of all, suggesting that Fine Gael can’t be trusted in government on their own, extended to laying down ‘conditions’ for a coalition arrangement.
Has nobody told them that a single vote has not yet been cast in the election? That talk of coalition ‘red lines’ is a tad premature and smacks of presumption and entitlement? The intervention of the trades unions can’t be helping their cause one whit either.
Judging by the mood out there, for the public this election is about kicking out Fianna Fail, and inflicting as much pain on them as possible on the way out. It’s not about any great enthusiasm for the ‘alternatives’ on offer. However much they may love themselves; the public don’t love them. If the polls are anything to go by, people just want a government, and an opposition, comprised of straight-talking representatives who will do the job they’re handsomely paid to do and get Ireland out of the fix it’s in as early as is reasonably possible.
When the history of Election 2011 is written, it may well tell the tale of a strategy that worked for Fine Gael, but in Labour’s case, of how the opportunity of a century in that party’s history was blown.
It’s not worth making seat projections until the last election poll is published. Even then, what the real poll of 25 February delivers may yet surprise us; but will certainly deliver a seismic change in the Irish political landscape.
SBP RedC has Labour down from 22% to 17% since the poll published on 6 February. Labour’s slo-mo single vehicle crash continues. Labour are no more popular than Fianna Fáil.
Talking today with a Labour Party member who has declined to canvass for the party in Dublin this election, he was scathing – party is out of touch, scare ads are a mistake.
Left to their own devices, Labour Party sense of moral superiority always trips them up. Are Labour living in a bubble? — a malevolent incubator maybe.
Fine Gael 39% (+1), Feb 4 poll average = 37%, trending 37%, 35%, 38%, 39%
Labour 17% (-3), Feb 4 poll average = 20%, trending 19%, 22%, 20%, 17%
Fianna Fail 16% (+1), Feb 4 poll average = 17%, trending 18%, 17%, 15%, 16%
Sinn Fein 12% (+2), Feb 4 poll average = 12%, trending 12%, 13%, 10%, 12%
Greens 2% (-1), Feb 4 poll average = 2-3%, trending 3%, 2%, 3%, 2%
Independents 14% (-), Feb 4 poll average = 12%, trending 11%, 11%, 14%, 14%
Undecided voters fall to 16%, from 17% last week.
Fine Gael results in this poll continues underlying trend seen over past 6-8 polls of gradual increasing vote, Labour trend is downwards.
AHCR,
He’s not alone.
Good news for Fine Gael
It seems that the scare tactics of the Labour Party have back fired. I think that the electorate have realised that the country needs a party that can act independently in the national interest. Fine Gael is tied neither to big business(Fianna Fail) or to the unions (Labour). This is why they are so far ahead in the polls.
Martin.
The only surprise about Labour’s campaign and conduct is that there is no surprise – same old same old. They don’t want to represent the people, they want the people to represent their Pharisaical doctrine. Once again, the people will ‘fail’ Labour on election day, and Ireland’s democracy will be the stronger for that.
@Martin Liddy
“Fine Gael is tied neither to big business(Fianna Fail) or to the unions (Labour).”
Perhaps not tied, but what about the cast of mind represented by “strong farmers” in suits, cassocks, medicine, law, wherever?
Is this lack of ties only because FG has not been in power?
How did FG clear its debt during the few years it was in power in 1994-97?
Let us see what emerges over next weekend and the following few years….
Whatever the GE throws up in numbers for the various parties, the most important thing for the country is to have a government in place on March 9th to pick up on the negotiations in Europe on the debt resolution crisis, among other things. We have, in effect, been without a functioning government since December and that’s a situation that cannot be sustained indefinitely. Most of the insults and charges and counter chanrges being exchanged between Labour and Fine Gael throughout this campaign are just bunkum. Someone remarked during the week that if an FG/Labour coalition split the difference on their tax and fiscal adjustment proposals, and eliminated the more crazy ideas on each side – like Labour’s 500m ‘jobs for the union boys’ politically controlled fund or their plans to add yet another bank to the failed complement we have already and Fine Gael’s 100,000 ‘Green’ jobs or mortgage relief schemes for ‘negative equity’ house buyers as an incentive to all mortgage payers to stop paying back their debt – you’d end up with something nearer the Fianna Fail Four Year Plan than anything else!
What worries a lot of middle-aged and older voters is that they have acute memories of the 1980s and the constant compromising between the FG and Labour parts of the then government on economic policy that postponed so-called ‘painful’ decisions, prolonging a depression that was even more cruel in its effects on people’s lives. Labour’s mid-election decision that it would seek to postpone the fiscal adjustment targets to 2016 rings more than a few bells, especially when combined with their tax and social welfare promises and lack of commitment to any credible strategy of public sector reform. Fine Gael have been visibly restraining themselves – against all their traditional political instincts – from promising hospitals on every street corner and a swimming poll in everyone’s back yard.
Irrespective of individual political leanings and loyalties, it would be foolish to expect too much from the next government, regardless of its composition. On the banks and the economy, no doubt they will try their level best. The one area though, where I believe citizens can hold their public representatives to account is on political reform. Not the junk proposals they’ve outlined in their manifestoes either; genuine citizen driven and citizen inspired reform of our political insitutions and the way they do their business in our name is the least we must demand.
It is imperative that Labour be excluded from the next Government. There are conflicting reports in this morning’s Sunday Independent about what FG will do if they come close. The Indo says they are talking informally to Independents like Finian McGrath and likely Independent TDs like the brother of former Independent TD Paddy McHugh.
The rallying-call of Michael McDowell in the 2002 General Election was “Single Party Government – No Thanks”. But in the current context where Coalition only set the seal on the vacillation that deprived the country of the decisive leadership that could have halted the housing-bubble before it was too late, and landed us with a poublic sector pay bill of €20 billion (larger than the actual deficit – excluding the bank bailouts) – not including another €20 billion for social-welfare – the traditional assumption that has pervaded Irish electoral-preferences since 1987 must now be revisited. Can a party with strong and historic institutional and financial ties to the public-sector unions be trusted to initiate the radical economic reforms required to reduce the deficit to 3% of GDP by 2014 as required by the IMF=EU bailour? Can a party dominated by the legal-profession be trusted to implement an independent-regulator for that profession as also mandated by the terms of the bailout? I have my doubts.
With conflicting reports in this morning’s newspapers as to FG’s intentions for forming a Government (the Sunday Independent says FG is talking informally to Independents while another says he will offer Labour the Justice and Foreign Affairs portfolios, the question of the likely configuration of the next government becomes a matter of grave concern. I intend to vote for FG and to continue transfers down the ballot paper for every candidate except for those of the Left. It is imperative that the next Government not constitute a 1980′s-style Fitzgerald-Spring government in which Fine Gael is prevented from reining in public-spending by a stooge of the public-sector unions. Labour’s participation in that government saw unemployment soar from 12% to 18% in 1982-7. Those citing the supposed success of the 1994-7 Government would do well to remember those were the days before Democratic-Left (largely comprised of former members of Official SF and its later monicker “The Worker’s Party”) succeeded in its reverse-takeover of the Labour Party. In 2011 it is now the Left which constitutes the ideology of reaction, intent like the nobility of Pre-Revolutionary France on protecting the unjust privileges of a public-sector elite represented by ICTU oligarchs on six-figure salaries warning of a “rightwing” single-party government, in the knowledge that it means the age of the private-sector supporting public-sector largesse on its broken backs is close to an end.
That same Mr Gilmore was shown on the evening news today asserting that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are not capable of governing in a fair or balanced way, and must have holier-than-thou Labour in government to guide them.
Such arrogance. If Labour want to hold the next government to account, Labour should (a word they love to use) do it from the opposition benches.
Part of the problem over the last few years was that Fianna fail were being told they had no mandate for carrying out the policies Fine gael are now espousing.
But now that nearly everyone has jumped on the Fine gael band-wagon there will problably be total legitimacy for the next government going ahead with their “austerity measures” in taking billions from the poor and middle class and giving it to the ECB/IMF at vasly higher interest rates than these benevolent oganisation are borrowing the money in the first place to give it to us (along with handing the country over to these organisations and allowing them to tell us we have to to lower wages,get rid of unions and privatise public services etc)
So be it!
By the way I intend to vote for those who believe the purpose of government is to protect the poor from the rich.