DUBLIN — Sinn Féin will not seek Ireland’s presidency and instead will throw its weight behind an independent socialist candidate already in the race, the Irish republican party announced Saturday after weeks of behind-the-scenes tussling.
Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald — who had already ruled out running herself — said her party’s executive had voted to back Catherine Connolly in the Oct. 24 election to become Ireland’s next head of state.
The endorsement of Sinn Féin, Ireland’s main opposition party, provides a big boost for Connolly, an opposition lawmaker from Galway who had already won backing from several other smaller left-wing parties.
McDonald said Sinn Féin’s ruling executive had decided they didn’t want to split the anti-establishment vote by running their own candidate in competition with Connolly.
She said Connolly was well placed to challenge the other two candidates in the field: Heather Humphreys of Fine Gael and Jim Gavin of Fianna Fáil. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have dominated Irish politics for the past century and are the main parties in Ireland’s current center-right government.
McDonald said Sinn Féin’s priority was to deny Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael the presidency, a largely ceremonial post that has no role in government and since 2011 has been held by the opposition left. The incumbent, Michael D. Higgins of the left-wing Labour Party, is constitutionally barred from running for a third seven-year term.
McDonald made the announcement alongside two other key Sinn Féin figures: Michelle O’Neill, who leads the cross-community government in the neighboring U.K. territory of Northern Ireland; and Pearse Doherty, Sinn Féin’s combative finance spokesman and deputy leader in the Irish parliament in Dublin. Doherty had been widely considered the most likely candidate, had Sinn Féin opted to run.
“This is a big decision to support a candidate from outside our membership and work with the combined opposition to collectively take on the government — to give people a clear choice,” McDonald said.
Connolly welcomed Sinn Féin’s support. She declined to confirm whether she had promised McDonald anything in return.
Like Sinn Féin, she is ardently pro-Palestinian and is an outspoken critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, though this position is broadly shared across the Irish political spectrum.
Last month, in an apparent bid to shore up support from Sinn Féin, Connolly traveled to Belfast and spoke approvingly of the Irish republicans’ ultimate goal — to reunify Ireland, ending its 104-year-old partition into a British north and an independent south.
Connolly reinforced this message on Saturday, saying she “treasures” the Irish constitution’s aspiration “to unite all the people who share the territory of Ireland.”
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