Gavan Reilly: A Labour-Soc Dems tie-up makes sense, but it wouldn’t succeed
You know that line about how a year is a long time in politics? Imagine how old I felt when I bumped into Brendan Howlin at the RDS last week and remembered that he was the last man to lead the Labour Party into a general election. Alan Kelly’s two-year tenure only began amid Covid-19.
It was Howlin who proposed a pre-election ‘progressive alliance’ in 2020. If the Social Democrats were unwilling to countenance a merger with Labour (and it was only their second election in existence, so fair enough), Howlin felt they ought to at least commit to forming a mini-bloc post election, alongside the Greens: it would be easier for a ‘big’ party to approach a cohesive pre-packaged bloc, he felt, than to string along three sets of talks with overlapping aims.
The idea never came to fruition, largely because the Green Party emerged as such dominant figures in 2020 that the need for like-minded partners was moot. But Howlin and I reminded each other of the idea as we watched the parcels of piles mount up in the RDs last week, ahead of Aodhán Ó Ríordáin eventually getting over the line to become MEP.
Dublin wasn’t the problem he was thinking of: it was Ireland South, where in a field of 23 candidates, Labour’s Niamh Hourigan polled 11th while the Social Democrat counterpart, Susan Doyle, was 13th. Had the two electorates coalesced on a single base, the singular candidate would have polled only just below Grace O’Sullivan of the Greens, and been in with a real shout of a seat. (Had the Greens been part of the same party, their 90,000 votes would have guaranteed a win.)
More illuminating is a study of transfer patterns across the three European races. Ó Riordáin largely got over the line because of a new phenomenon where voters transfer to candidates not because of their ideology, but rather whether they are part of the establishment or not. Labour are now as likely to win transfers from FF and FG voters as they are from the Greens.
Tellingly, though, the Social Democrats distribution is a little more diffuse. When Hourigan was eliminated in Ireland South, her votes did transfer handsomely to Grace O’Sullivan and Susan Doyle in good numbers… but the next highest beneficiaries were the Fianna Fáil pairing, Billy Kelleher and Cynthia Ní Mhurchú. When Doyle bowed out a few counts later, a comparatively huge share of her vote went to Sinn Féin.
Maybe the talk of a Labour-Social Democrats tie-up is therefore a little bit premature. The SocDems probably know keenly that there is a chunk of the electorate which sees itself as ‘respectable’, and want a party with Labour values but not Labour’s history - and who are keen to elect a fully left-leaning government led by the likes of Sinn Féin.
A formal alliance probably obliterates that chance, whether as a full merger or a pre-election pact of some sort. Labour voters seem happy to support further coalitions with the parties they’ve already governed with. SocDem voters seem keener to support the ones who haven’t.