liberation

Irish elections: No politics of substance? Create a panic, instead

In response to my earlier blog post on the Ideological collapse in Irish politics, Philip Ferguson has supplied the following guest blog post elaborating on my previous point about how the campaigns of the various parties in the southern Irish elections lack issues of substance.
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In the final week of the Irish election campaign, one thing has united most of the players: create a panic about the dangers of Sinn Féin getting into government and scare people into voting for your party. While the Labour Party (historically the third party in the south of Ireland) has an actual electoral alliance with Fine Gael (historically, the second main party), Labour leader Pat Rabbitte is now intimating that his party could go into coalition with Fianna Fail in order to save Fianna Fail from coalition with Sinn Féin. [Read more below]

Ideological collapse in Irish politics

Ireland – a country with many similarities to New Zealand - is about to go to the polls. And as with NZ politics, there’s been an ideological collapse in Irish politics. Despite having proportional representation in both countries - which is supposed to encourage ideological diversity – in both countries it seems to have had a very homogenizing effect. This is certainly Jason Walsh’s view of Irish politics, which you can read in his Guardian article A poor advertisement for politics. He says ‘the ideological collapse in Irish politics is breathtaking’, and ‘No matter who wins the 2007 general election, the voters will lose’. It certainly sounds like NZ. According to Walsh, Irish voters have a choice ‘between two populist conservative parties slugging it out for control of government supported by their Labour-conservative and radical-conservative partners’, and ‘Instead of issues and ideas we have scandals’, which he says are ‘a poor substitute for politics’. He quotes from a John O'Farrell novel to say, ‘What's the difference between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael? The same as the difference between shit and shite.’ While all this is surely true, there are some interesting things about this week’s Irish election. First, as Owen Bowcott points out in A boom too far, ‘After centuries of poverty, mass emigration and underinvestment, there is a new political agenda emerging in Ireland: how to cope with the consequences of affluence’ – essentially mainstream parties have failed to manage the economic boom, especially in distributing any of the proceeds fairly. Second, Sinn Féin are doing very well (8-10%), and could possibly take part in the next government of the South, meaning that the party would for the first time be in power in both the south and north of Ireland.

Italy’s Catholic and ex-communist parties merge

Italy’s former Communist Party has shifted further to the right, in an attempt to create a ‘broad church’ centre-left party similar to the US Democratic Party. The Italian CP was once the biggest CP in the West, with 1.8m members. In the early 1990s it ditched its (Stalinist) communism, renaming itself the Democratic Left Party. Now it is ditching the ‘left’ part altogether and merging with the Catholic Democracy and Freedom party (or ‘Margherita’), to be just the Democratic Party. The new party will be the biggest in Italy – in the last election ex-communist party gained 17.5% of the vote, and Margherita (led by Francesco Rutelli) won 10.7% - and will have a majority of ministers in the Romano Prodi Government. In fact, Prodi is the driving force behind the project, and is also advancing the merger of centre and left parties at the European level – essentially wanting the European left to take the form of the American democrats. However it’s interesting that even The Economist points out the de-radicalised nature of the new formation: ‘Mr Prodi wants the Democratic Party to be like its American namesake, but it will not be. Its leftmost tip may match the Democrats; but on the right it takes in members of Mr Rutelli's party who look more Republican.’ See also: Financial Times: Italian centre-left parties merge; and WSWS: Italy’s former Communist Party has shifted further to the right