Legislative: In Ireland, the center right finishes one seat short of the majority

The center-right parties Fianna Fail and Fine Gael finished one seat short of a majority after the legislative elections late Monday in Ireland, where the Greens were among the big losers of the vote.

The country should therefore see the coalition of these two parties returned to power, provided that it rallies an 88th elected official, synonymous with a majority in Parliament.

Of the 174 seats at stake and all allocated, the two center-right parties Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, which have alternated in power for more than a century and had formed a government coalition after the last elections in 2020, won respectively 48 and 39, or 87 together.

Electoral rout

In 2020, they agreed to build a government with the Greens as the minority party. But the latter suffered an electoral rout: of the 12 seats they occupied in the previous Parliament, they only managed to retain one, that of their leader, Roderic O’Gorman.

Within the coalition with Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, “we were very different, we took the risk of joining them, (…) but there are political consequences to taking this risk and we suffered them ” said Roderic O’Gorman.

For Eoin O’Malley, political scientist at Dublin City University, the Greens, “as a small party, have always been in a precarious situation.” “They were accused of being responsible for the increase in energy costs and (…) several unpopular government measures,” added this political scientist.

Failure of the far right

Far-right candidates failed to gain a place in Parliament, even though for the first time, immigration was one of the dominant themes of the election campaign.

“There were too many anti-immigration candidates, which divided the vote, and several of them were too extreme,” analyzes Eoin O’Malley. Sinn Fein, the left-wing nationalist party and the main opposition party, obtained 38 seats, but the chances of it entering government are almost zero.

During the campaign, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael ruled out any alliance with this party, the former political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) paramilitary group, to form a government. During the previous election in 2020, Sinn Fein had already failed to form a coalition even though it came first in number of votes.

Search for allies

Fianna Fail and Fine Gael will look for allies to form a coalition. They could turn to Labour, which obtained 11 seats according to partial results, or the Social Democrats (11 seats), both center left, or to independent candidates.

After the 2020 elections, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael decided to split the mandate in two. The leader of Fianna Fail, Micheal Martin, left his place as head of government in December 2022 to the leader of Fine Gael, then Leo Varadkar.

Simon Harris succeeded the latter in April as Fine Gael leader and prime minister. The new Parliament is due to sit from December 18, but the formation of the government could take several more weeks.

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