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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is an FT contributing editor
It is not often that European leaders quit before they are forced to. Nor announce that they no longer think they are the best person for the job. So Leo Varadkar’s resignation as Ireland’s taoiseach came as a jolt. At first glance, his departure testifies to the inevitable ups and downs of politics; at second, it is a measure of deeper changes in the nation’s political landscape.
Varadkar’s explanation was less than illuminating. His reasons, he said, were “personal and political” — which covers just about everything. It is true enough that, chosen in 2017 as Ireland’s youngest ever taoiseach, he has long said that he intended to try something else when he reached the ripe age of 50. Those sort of promises are made to be broken. Anyway, he is 45.
On the face of it, the Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil-Green coalition of which Varadkar took the helm should be in rude health. The economy boasts full employment and the government is running budget surpluses. And his record bears scrutiny. Young, openly gay and of Indian heritage, his rise became an emblem of Ireland’s embrace of modernity. He won plaudits for his handling of the Covid emergency and outplayed three British prime ministers to ensure that the Republic’s open border with Northern Ireland escaped the fallout from the UK’s departure from the EU.
It was not enough. Electoral choices are no longer framed only by the economy. Ireland faces a general election within a year and the coalition parties are languishing in the polls. Support for Varadkar’s Fine Gael is depressed. This month, his proposal to update the traditionalist framing in the constitution of the definition of the family and the role of mothers fell foul of a backlash in two referendums. Fine Gael’s prospects in June’s local and European elections look grim.
As for Varadkar, the promise was never quite matched by the performance. The voters did not warm to him. Many of his parliamentary colleagues have announced that they will be stepping back from politics at the election — perhaps he jumped for fear of being pushed.
But reading the resignation runes should not obscure the bigger story of Irish politics. Ireland’s ascent from one of Europe’s poorest to among its richest nations has been accompanied by an upending of the old politics. If the opinion polls are right then Sinn Féin, already in government and the largest party in Northern Ireland, will also emerge as the largest party in the Dáil after Ireland’s general election, which must be held by March 2025.
The old rules were rewritten by the Good Friday peace deal of 1998 and the global financial crash a decade later. Politics until then belonged to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. One or other of them — most often it was Fianna Fáil — was at the head of every government.
Both parties sat on the centre right. In policy terms — managing the economy, public spending, taxes — there was little to separate them. Instead, they drew their identities from where they stood during the civil war that followed independence in 1922. Fine Gael was the party of Michael Collins, Fianna Fáil claimed the mantle of Eamon de Valera. In the election that preceded the Good Friday Agreement, between them the two took 131 of the 166 Dáil seats. Sinn Féin — the political arm of the Irish Republican Army — secured only one.
That duopoly has been broken. One of the unintended consequences of the Northern Ireland peace accord was to legitimise Sinn Féin in the south as well as north. Young voters do not make the connection with IRA violence. The devastating impact of the 2008 global crash on the Irish economy gave the party its opportunity. Ireland’s embrace of globalisation has made it much richer — though high rewards for some have been matched by heavy costs for others.
In many European countries the “left-behinds” have been swept up by the far right. Ireland has seen something of this in street protests against immigration. Sinn Féin, though, has built its constituency from the populist left. By the republic’s 2011 election it had pushed up its vote share to 10 per cent. By 2020 it was 24.5 per cent.
The party’s raison d’être remains a united Ireland, but it courts voters by promising to fix the country’s long-standing housing shortage, to rescue its underfunded health service and to tax wealthy beneficiaries of Ireland’s open economy. Present polls give it about 30 per cent of voters, with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil stranded at around 20 per cent each.
Nothing is set in stone. The higher education minister Simon Harris, poised to become new Fine Gael leader and taoiseach, has a year to rebuild support. And even if Sinn Féin wins a third of the vote, there is no guarantee it will find a coalition partner. But some in Ireland imagined everything else could change while politics stayed the same. They were wrong.
