Presidential Election: A Bloody Nose For Fianna Fáil And Fine Gael!

The Catherine Connolly victory in the Presidential election is a bloody nose for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. But they can recover unless we start fighting on housing and the issues that matter to working class people.

Heather Humphreys was a terrible candidate even by Blueshirt standards, she stumbled through interviews, went on about our “allies” as if the country was already at war and got a tonne of stick for saying fox hunting was a “rural pursuit!” Presidential elections have a big focus on personality, Heather Humphreys didn’t have one.

But Fine Gael couldn’t resist mud slinging and tried negative campaigning against Connolly, which dramatically backfired. Fianna Fáil’s candidate, GAA celebrity Jim Gavin, turned out to be a dodgy rent-stealing landlord and Michael Martin ended up with egg on his face. It’s great to see Fianna Fáil now tearing strips off each other as TD’s sign a no confidence motion in their party leader.

The lack of a Fianna Fáil candidate and the persistence of rivalry between the two politically identical right wing parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, opened the election up. The mainstream media went into attack mode and tried to dig up every bit of Catherine Connolly’s past but this just added to the perception she was an anti-establishment candidate. It’s funny to see right wing rags like the Daily Mail in a panic over the vote.

Millionaire Maria Steen complained about failing to secure a nomination and while working class socialists defend any extension of democratic rights under this system, you have to laugh at a woman worth €27 million posturing as an anti-establishment figure.

Presidents have no power so there’s less at stake than in a general election, where the candidate you vote for might get to implement budgets, that’s why Presidential elections don’t translate directly onto subsequent general election results.

At Dublin Castle Catherine Connolly had to shake hands with Michael Martin and Simon Harris, both of whom will be on the Council of State advising the President. She’ll now be powerless to do anything except mouth the occassional criticism of government from the Áras.

Understanding the dynamics of the election

Catherine Connolly got 914,143 votes, more votes than any other candidate in a Presidential election. While the turnout was just 45.8%, this is high for a Presidential vote. Young people overwhelmingly voted for Connolly, 83% polled among 18 to 34 year olds said they were voting Connolly, while Fine Gael were only on 12% in the same age group.

The Connolly vote of 914,143 is slightly less than the 934,063 votes cast for the combined left parties and left independents in the 2020 general election. But higher than the 2024 combined left vote of 782,034. The Connolly campaign managed to win 152,029 voters in the context of the two horse race.

A lack of mass mobilisation and the consequent demoralisation this produced had provided the soil for far right ideas to grow seeing Sinn Féin lose 116,968 voters between the 2020 and the 2024 elections, yet recent polls and the Presidential vote indicate they’ve won many of those voters back. Sinn Féin were up by 5% in one poll and 3% in another, while Labour and the Social Democrats benefited too.

In the exit poll 51% of Catherine Connolly voters said they’d support a left government while 59% said they actually voted for Catherine Connolly and not just against the other candidate. 23% of Connolly voters said they would not vote for a left coalition.

In the exit poll 89% of Connolly voters said the individual candidate was more important than the parties backing the candidate. This is an aspect of every Presidential election. 68% of Connolly voters thought she represented continuity with President Michael D. Higgins - she’s also a soft spoken left moderate from the West of Ireland.

When asked why they voted for Connolly 46% said honesty mattered while just 27% said values and ideology. 29% noted her personal demeanor, while only 7% said they backed Connolly because of the coalition of parties backing her.

A majority, 61% of people, who voted for Connolly said they wanted a President who’d criticise the government. This contrasts with Heather Humphreys voters of which only 15% thought a President should be critical of the government of the day.

Dublin South Central, which includes Crumlin and Ballyfermot, gave Catherine Connolly her highest vote percentage of 79% - in absolute numbers this represented 18,750 votes. In the 2020 general election the combined left parties and independents got 32,330 votes in the area while in 2024 the left got 26,083 votes.

In Dublin Mid West, which includes Neilstown and Lucan, the Catherine Connolly vote was 20,412 compared to a combined left vote in 2020 which was 27,813 and in 2024 was 23,637 votes.

The Spoil Your Vote campaign

Multi-millionaire Maria Steen failed to secure a nomination and initiated a campaign for people to spoil their votes. This was backed by all the far right and most of the populist right groups. 67.4% of spoil vote voters said they’d have voted for Maria Steen.

Steen is a millionaire backed by the Iona Institute which in turn is funded by conservative Catholic groups as diverse as members of the aristocratic Hapsburg family and Russian tycoons. She complained about lack of choice in the Presidential election when ironically she wants to remove choice from women.

There were 18,000 spoiled votes in the 2011 and 2018 Presidential election campaigns. In this election there were 213,738 spoiled votes. This is equivalent to 50% of Sinn Féin’s vote in the general election and almost 3.5 times the PBP Solidarity 2024 election vote.

While the spoil vote campaign was clearly aligned with the far right, with only 5% of People Before Profit voters saying they spoiled, it also had an economic underpinning with 91% of spoil vote voters saying the economy was getting worse.

Some of the poor people who spoiled their vote can be won back if there is a fighting left because only 20% of spoil voters said they’d made up their mind before the election campaign began while 56% said they made up their mind to spoil in the last 3 weeks of the campaign.

Constituencies with the highest number of spoiled votes were Dublin North West at 20.5%, Dublin Mid West at 20.2% and Dublin South-Central at 19.0%. These constituencies include some of the most deprived areas in Ireland including: Neilstown, Ballyfermot, Finglas and Ballymun.

The majority in those overall areas voted Catherine Connolly but the margins were narrower in the poorest estates. In estates like Quarryvale in Clondalkin there were 290 spoiled votes while Catherine Connolly got 317 - almost the same as the spoiled votes.

It’s clear there’s a fight on for the heart and soul of the poorest estates which are torn between the left and the far right. Intense hatred for the government is clear. But how it is focused is the key question, up at the government or out onto other workers and poor people.

Prospects of a left government?

51% of Connolly voters, just over 466,000 people, said they wanted a left government. That’s a lot less than the 934,063 combined left vote from 2020. Another 26% said they were “not sure” about it. The picture is therefore more complicated than that painted by the rosy rhetoric coming from the left over the last few days.

The “left” is a problematic term, it’s a cover all term for different parties with different class bases and very different politics. Sinn Féin has a working class electoral base but is a middle class party, they believe in the middle class utopian idea that you can run Irish capitalism and keep workers and bosses happy simultaneously, you can’t. You have to pick a side.

The Labour Party is the political expression of the conservative union bureaucrats, while the Green Party are middle class Thatcheries on bikes. Yet a left government is impossible without Sinn Féin leading it and the inclusion of the rotten Labour Party, the soft Soc Dems and the Greens.

We’d like to see the back of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. But let’s be clear who we’re replacing them with.

After the Presidential vote People Before Profit posted on social media that the left had captured the Presidency, next step was the Dáil! Their position is to convince voters they’d join a Sinn Féin led government while behind the scenes saying they’d use their “red line” principles to stay out of it.

Many Catherine Connolly voters said they voted because she represented honesty, yet we obviously need more political honesty on the radical left. There is a working class left and a middle class left, a socialist left and a liberal left. They are not all the same.

People Before Profit’s idea of a Sinn Féin led left capturing the local councils, Presidency and then the Dáil is just a rehash of the well worn out idea that was put forward in Greece by Syriza - a long march through the institutions of the capitalist state will bring socialism.

Before Syriza got into power and betrayed the working class there were 32 general strikes in Greece, afterwards the movement was demoralized by the so-called long march through the institutions. Syriza implemented half a dozen austerity budgets.

We Reds have always been clear and honest. Sinn Féin have promised Davy Stockbrokers they won’t interfere with capitalism, therefore they will not challenge the system and a coalition between them, Labour, the Soc Dems and the Greens won’t be that radical. Any future Red TD would have to vote to get rid of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael but would vote for the Sinn Féin government externally and case by case.

Any other option would see a socialist TD suffocated by Sinn Féin, Labour and the Greens and tied to every compromise they would inevitably make with the system. The consequent working class frustration with this left coalition would lead to a return of the establishment or a dangerously emboldened far right.

And the idea that a shift to the centre left represents a wholesale shift to the left is a failure to understand that sections of the working class can move in different directions at once. The centre left can pull from the right and from the radical left at the same time. The class struggle is more like the organic ebb and flow of tides and eddies rather than a mechanical process.

Sinn Féin for example gained voters as the level of activity in the working class fell from the heights of the water protests in 2016 to the sour mood of 2020. They gained 240,276 votes as the movement declined. People tend to believe in saviours from above when the movement from below falls back.

The fate of the radical left is tied to struggle as is clear from the PBP Solidarity vote which fell from 84,168 in 2016 to 57,420 in 2020 and recovered slightly up to 62,481 in 2024 but key candidates in working class constituencies, like Gino Kenny and Hazel Norton, lost thousands of voters.

The fate of the working class left is tied to struggle. The middle class left are on a path to running the system for the bosses. Most people won’t see that until it hits them right in the face. But we need to build a significant minority who see it coming before it happens so that we can intensify struggle and not see it fall into demoralisation as happened in Greece.

Political alliances to put Sinn Féin in power should not be the focus of the working class left. Political alliances always benefit the bigger players in the alliance. This is clear from the polls. Let Sinn Féin look after themselves. Our job is to organise all those workers who want to fight the system, organise them and warn them what’s coming down the line.

Instead of political alliances with Sinn Féin and the likes of Labour we want to see united front social movements on housing and the cost of living, where parties like Sinn Féin and Labour are forced to show if they can fight on the streets and in the workplaces. It will soon be seen that they can’t and that they will always chase after the lure of capitalist power. Put them to that test!

“Universal suffrage (voting) is thus the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the modern state” the German revolutionary Engels once wrote. Voting tells you how people intend to solve their problems but it doesn’t actually solve the problem.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael can face a political defeat yet resuscitate on the basis of the powerful class of bosses they represent. The Connolly vote shows there’s a potential for fightback out there but we need to get out and win people. Ending capitalism in Ireland isn’t going to be easy, but nothing worth fighting for ever is.

If you agree and are willing to work hard then join the Reds.