Eight months ago, I was in Ireland for a conference of the left that was affiliated with the leftwing People Before Profit party, and Donald Trump’s favorite mixed martial arts fighter, Conor McGregor, was the biggest name in the country’s presidential race. I was there to talk about Trump and the United States, but also to report on the rise of the far right in Ireland, which has grown dramatically in recent years on the back of anti-immigrant campaigns. Those campaigns had spilled over into violence, including several fires by arsonists at hotels and other buildings accommodating asylum seekers.
But on October 25, when the votes were counted the day after Ireland’s presidential election, it was a sweeping victory for the left, and McGregor hadn’t even made the ballot. Catherine Connolly, an independent member of Dáil Éireann, the lower house and principal chamber of the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament, had won with the highest vote percentage in the history of the office. (Because Ireland uses instant runoff or ranked choice voting, it’s worth noting that Connolly’s 63 percent of the vote also includes the highest number of first-preference votes ever for president.)
Connolly won with the support of Ireland’s broad (and often disunited) left: Sinn Féin, Labour, People Before Profit, the Social Democrats, Solidarity, the Green Party, and several smaller leftist parties and organizations. This allowed the election to have both a clear left-right divide—one that is not always so obvious in a country whose parties do not map easily onto the kind of partisan split U.S. voters are used to—and to serve as a referendum on the politics of the ruling coalition between center-right parties Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The left built a popular front of sorts that was able to counter far-right arguments while also challenging the center-right narrative that has dominated Irish politics and press for so long.
Like popular left candidates across the world, from New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to Britain’s former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Connolly’s support base was among young voters. Though the role of president in Ireland is largely ceremonial, her policy platform nevertheless sounded notes that will be familiar to readers of The Progressive: criticism of Israel’s genocide in Palestine; a call to make housing affordable again (Ireland faces one of the most brutal housing crises in Europe); support for immigrants’ rights; and a call for transformative policies in the face of climate change.
These were paired with more specifically Irish issues: Connolly is a Gaeilgeoir, or Irish-language speaker, having achieved fluency as an adult, who called for Irish reunification and the maintenance of Irish neutrality, and criticized the rearmament of Europe under pressure from Trump. Her opponents tried to paint her as a Hamas-supporting loony, but mostly succeeded in making themselves look ridiculous.
Much has been made in the press of the high number of spoiled ballots, after a concerted campaign by the right to claim that the presidential election process was undemocratic because McGregor and other rightwing candidates failed to meet the threshold to appear on the ballot. In some constituencies, there were more spoiled votes than there were for Fine Gael’s Heather Humphreys, the second-place candidate, and voters wrote messages on their ballot that included “not my president,” McGregor’s name, and even Donald Trump’s. But even with 12 percent of the ballots spoiled and a low turnout, Connolly’s win was decisive.
Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin, an Irish musician and activist with People Before Profit, wrote in Rebel News: “The spoiled votes are being overblown both by the far right and the establishment—it’s less than the Peter Casey vote in 2018. Nevertheless, their number is a reflection of the growth of the far right in Ireland. Of course, not everyone who spoiled their vote is far right, but there is a battle in Irish society for who can give direction to the justified anger among ordinary people at the established order. The Connolly campaign has shown that a principled left, campaigning from below, can be greater than the sum of its parts and has the unique capacity to win people back.”
Dublin lawyer and organizer Gary Daly had commented to me in March that the Irish left hasn’t been this united since the Right2Change platform in 2016. Back then, 106 candidates from a variety of parties endorsed a policy platform that included the right to decent work, health care, housing, debt justice (including an E.U. financial transaction tax), education, a pledge to fight climate change and bad trade policies, and the right to water. Water charges had been the focus of the country’s anti-austerity movement, after years of punishing cuts in order to bail out the banks after the 2008 global crisis. Union activist Mandy La Combre told me then, “For a nation that effectively bailed out the European banking system, the commodification and attempted privatization of our water was a step too far.” Unions and activists from across the country took to the streets, using direct action tactics to resist the installation of water meters and succeeding in rolling back the water charges.
Right2Change was a stab at the kind of coalition across parties that came together to elect Connolly; at its height, it saw at least 20,000 people rally in Dublin. But, Daly told me, infighting splintered the nascent collaboration, and despite widespread disillusionment and anger, the two mainstream parties have clung to power, as they have for almost the entirety of an independent Ireland, even as Sinn Féin has increased its vote dramatically and the smaller parties and leftist independents have expanded their own bases. Those parties have built power by doing old-fashioned organizing around issues and elections, doorknocking, and making connections one person at a time.
Connolly comes out of this kind of movement work; in contrast, her main opponent, Humphreys, had been a target of protests as the government minister for culture. I met protesters fighting the demolition of the Moore Street Market back in 2016, who were demanding Humphreys stand with them rather than with the property developers who wanted to level the historically diverse street market. Ultimately, it was easy to paint her as out of touch with working people who are struggling to pay the bills, particularly sky-high rents, across the country. “The planets kind of aligned for the left,” Daly said.
It can be hard to apply lessons from Irish politics to the United States; while both countries are former British colonies, the postcolonial trajectory has been very different. Ireland’s political parties, as noted above, don’t map obviously onto a left-right terrain so much as they do onto Ireland’s unfinished struggle for independence.
Connolly is no Mamdani, but she did share with Corbyn and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders an unexpected charisma on social media and appeal across generations. She also refused to walk back political positions that were seen as vote-killers by the savvy media class, and it turned out that more people agreed with her than with the press. But the presidential election in Ireland is an easy place to lodge a protest vote, while when it comes to the elections for the Dáil, voters might be more inclined toward pragmatism.
And there’s the problem of holding together the coalition that got behind Connolly: While the smaller leftist parties have shown a willingness to back a potential Sinn Féin-led government, both the Labour Party and the Greens have at different times been in coalition with one or the other of the governing parties in Ireland, and thus are tainted by association with austerity, Daly noted. “A lot of people like myself will find it difficult to support a left platform that includes the Labour Party, but needs must.”
Then there’s the question of whether they could agree again on a common platform: The leftwing parties will want things like housing for all to be the centerpiece, while the Greens and Labour might resist anything they see as too radical.
Meanwhile, since election day, the press has talked up the spoiled votes and the far-right discontent more than it has the successful collaboration of the left; the coalition parties are already making noises about moving still further right on immigration. It will take more work to build a durable coalition that can actually return a progressive government to office, but it does look like that work is ongoing.
When Daly and I spoke again on November 4, a public meeting had just taken place the previous night focused on uniting the left; It was well-attended and enthusiastic. “The usual sniping certainly hasn’t happened because the left won,” Daly said. “Everybody’s happy and everybody’s claiming victory.”