The Rise of Sinn Fein in Neoliberalism's Fifth Decade

Ireland voted last Saturday, and for the first time in a general election Sinn Fein won the most votes, and not by an insignificant margin. As Benjamin Mueller summarizes in "Irish Voters Cast Off Relic of Entrenched 2-Party System":

By the time the votes were counted this week, Sinn Fein held one fewer parliamentary seats than Ireland’s main center-right opposition party, Fianna Fail, which had been expected to romp to victory. And it captured two more seats than the current center-right governing party, Fine Gael, led by Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s frontman in negotiations with London over Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union.

Sinn Fein would have won more seats, but the party didn't field enough candidates.

Fianna Fail has ruled out governing in coalition with Sinn Fein because of its historical association with the Irish Republican Army and the Troubles. So now it is up to Fine Gael to see if it wants to eat crow and join Fianna Fail. Both centrist parties had previously ruled out governing together.

What's interesting about the Irish election is the role that housing played. Mueller reports that

“Every other politician, they say they’re going to do this and that,” said Tony Hayes, 64, who lives in central Dublin. “But at the end of the day, they’re feeding you loads of lies. So why not go to somebody you feel like you can trust them? Sinn Fein, you feel like you can trust them.”

There was one issue above all that drove Mr. Hayes’s anger at Ireland’s two old political heavyweights and endeared him, like many voters, to Sinn Fein: housing. The number of homeless people has been rising for years, eclipsing 10,000 in 2019. And average rents have increased by as much as 40 percent in some counties over the past three years.

[snip]

Ailbhe Smyth, 73, a political activist and feminist scholar who played a leading role in the campaign to repeal Ireland’s abortion ban, said that many were feeling the anguish of a crisis that had forced people to wait weeks or years for some medical appointments, despite the government’s lavish spending on health care. She said older people, too, had woken up to the pain that Ireland’s cultural and political norms had inflicted on the younger generations.

While power was passed back and forth between the two center-right parties, parts of Irish identity, such as the expectation that people could grow up to own their own homes, began to vanish. And just as Ms. Smyth said the vote for abortion rights had been driven in part by “a very deep sense of national shame at the way women had been treated historically in this country,” she said that the turnout this weekend reflected the regret of some voters for not vanquishing an outdated political system sooner.

“Older people voting for Sinn Fein are saying, ‘Well, actually, my son, my daughter, my grandchildren, they haven’t got a house,’” Ms. Smyth said. “So there is that feeling of guilt that we’re not leaving them a very good world — and we’ve wrecked the planet, too.”

Facing up to rivals like Mr. Varadkar, who focused during the campaign on Brexit achievements that few voters cared about, Sinn Fein stuck to a few clear, tangible promises. And rather than harping on the government’s failures, as it recently had during unsuccessful campaigns, the party tried to home in on what it would get done. It vowed, for instance, to spend 6.5 billion euros, about $7 billion, building 100,000 homes.

The gestalt of the Irish general election is similar to the one facing voters this year in the United States; call it the zombie neoliberalism gestalt -- a housing/homelessness crisis and a failing healthcare system. After four decades of market fundamentalist orthodoxy the basics -- housing, education and healthcare -- are being priced out of the reach of an ever greater number of citizens. Rather than make an adjustment and correct these failures of the market, the elites who control the political process prefer that the citizens bear the brunt of the failures. Whether that means paying more and working harder to pay more or going into debt or living on the street, the rich don't care, as long as you don't upend their gravy train.