DUBLIN — Ireland’s election winners face a difficult backroom struggle to forge a new coalition government — one strong enough to withstand the economic threats posed by incoming U.S. President Donald Trump.
Prime Minister Simon Harris and Foreign Minister Micheál Martin, from rival parties but currently coalition colleagues, have yet to begin negotiations on a new partnership following last week’s election. The full results, confirmed Tuesday, saw their centrist parties gain unexpected strength but still fall a few seats short of a governing majority.
Martin — who is expected to succeed Harris as Taoiseach, the Irish “chief” of the government, because his party is now substantially bigger than that of Harris — said Trump’s imminent return to the White House imposed “an effective deadline” on Ireland’s own government formation challenge.
Both leaders have stressed they need to negotiate a wider political alliance and launch a new administration in time for Jan. 20, Trump’s inauguration date.
On Thursday, the eve of the election, Harris said if Ireland failed to forge a new government by Trump’s inauguration, his country would be in a weaker position to respond to any early tariffs the administration imposed on EU goods.
Ireland is among the bloc’s biggest exporters to the U.S, most critically of drugs made by the top American pharma companies based in Ireland — a powerful cluster of U.S. activity wooed here since the 1960s with low-tax incentives.
The nearly 1,000 American multinationals in Ireland today constitute by far the country’s biggest contributors of income tax and corporate tax, Ireland’s top two sources of revenue.
Harris has warned that were Ireland to lose even the top three companies, a tenth of the state’s tax revenue might head overseas as well. He declined to name them in keeping with Ireland’s protection of business confidentiality.
A shamrock deadline
Top U.S. employers in Ireland include Apple — recently ordered by the European Union to pay Dublin more than €14 billion in back taxes and interest — as well as Google, Microsoft, Intel and most U.S. pharmaceutical giants.
Harris said the formation of the government, which is often a protracted process in Ireland — it took five months last time — shouldn’t run past January because the key diplomatic event on the Irish political calendar is perennially St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, in Washington.
That’s when, ever since the Eisenhower administration, Irish prime ministers have visited the White House and Capitol Hill for ceremonies, speeches and behind-the-scenes dealmaking. The Irish — who sought to flatter their way through the first Trump regime and won more U.S. investment following the Republican’s 2017 corporate tax reforms — expect a much more difficult visit this time.
“I don’t want to be waiting until someone’s handing over shamrock in the White House next March,” Harris told reporters on Monday, referring to the cliché photocall of each year’s White House festivities. “I want an early engagement with President-elect Trump before he even takes office, if possible.”
But among the many points of tension the Irish will have to resolve themselves is who their leader will be.
At the moment it’s Harris, a 38-year-old relative newcomer to the top job of Taoiseach. But the election outcome has dropped his Fine Gael party into second place behind Martin’s Fianna Fáil.
The two parties — which trace their origins to the opposite sides in Ireland’s vicious civil war that followed independence from Britain a century ago — combined political forces for the first time in 2020 to block a rapidly growing Sinn Féin party from leading a Dublin government for the first time.
Sinn Féin out in the cold
Sinn Féin had long seen this election as its big chance to gain power in both parts of Ireland for the first time. Earlier this year, the Irish republican party took charge of the revived cross-community government in neighboring Northern Ireland, and considers wielding power in both Belfast and Dublin to be an ideal way of promote the island’s eventual political unification, its overarching goal.
But that ambition will have to be put on hold a further five years, barring any crises in the next Dublin government, after this election saw Sinn Féin’s fortunes fade, while Fianna Fáil scored surprising gains.
Fianna Fáil now has 48 lawmakers in an enlarged 174-seat parliament, its best performance since 2007. Harris’ Fine Gael scored a more modest 38 seats, one fewer than Sinn Féin. The Irish republicans actually outperformed their vote share, which slid by 5 points to 19 percent, the biggest drop of any party.
Together, Martin and Harris now control 86 votes, just two short of the 88 needed to form a government. This gives them multiple options for building a strong majority — though each potential new partner could demand a price they don’t want to pay.
While Sinn Féin chief Mary Lou McDonald has called on Ireland’s fractured panoply of left-wing opposition parties to come together and attempt to form an alternative government, she lacks the numbers to govern and appears doomed to a further five years in opposition.
Sinn Féin’s current tactic appears geared to making it more difficult for any of those smaller left-wing parties to break ranks and agree to prop up Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, which between them have led every Irish government since independence.
If no party from the left agrees to work with the “civil war parties,” it would be due in part to the terrible outcomes that have befallen any small party to have done so in the past.
Annihilation on the left
Since Fianna Fáil’s half-century of political dominance ended in the 1980s and multi-party coalitions became the Irish norm, smaller parties that entered government have without exception been crushed by voters in the following election.
This brutal pattern was just repeated. In 2020, when Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael needed a substantial third party to forge a majority, it persuaded the dozen lawmakers of the environmentalist Greens to join their coalition.
On Nov. 29, voters annihilated the Greens, dumping all of their lawmakers bar Roderic O’Gorman, who barely scraped home, winning the last available seat in his constituency.
Now it could be the turn of one or more left-of-center parties on the rise: Labour, a veteran of coalition entries and electoral slaughters, or the fledgling Social Democrats, a Labour breakaway more hostile to cooperation with the old guard. Both won 11 seats, more than enough to give the next government numerical strength.
Notably, however, these left-wing parties are also the most critical of Trump. Harris and Martin, by contrast, have avoided uttering a single syllable in criticism of Trump since his election victory last month.
Should Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil fail to strike a deal with anyone on the left, they could potentially strike individual deals with a wide range of rural independent lawmakers, a feature of Irish politics that has grown in size this election. That would give the next government a center-right slant.
Those rural independents often speak admiringly of Trump, just as they criticize immigration, the “woke” agenda and climate action policies that threaten Ireland’s dairy and beef herds, the biggest producers of greenhouse gases in the country.
A government official — granted permission to speak anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss such matters — told POLITICO that the choice of a “third leg to prop up the government stool” would add an edge to its Trump-era diplomacy.
“If we let the independents into government, we could have Cabinet ministers singing Trump’s praises,” the official said. “If we get Labour on board, we could end up with Cabinet ministers calling him a fascist.
“We don’t really want either option. We want to keep our heads down as much as possible, and fight our corner as quietly and politely as possible, for the next four years — and just hope and pray our economy’s still going strong on the other side.”
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