Ireland’s anti-immigration revolt fizzles out
As H&D predicted a month ago, Ireland’s much-hyped anti-immigration movement turned into a divided and mostly feeble electoral challenge last week. (Though Ireland voted on Friday, results weren’t declared until the following Thursday.) Two right-wing independents were elected as MEPs and a third (in Dublin) narrowly failed, but these were conservatives rooted mainly in anti-abortion and other Catholic social conservative movements, rather than in the anti-immigration protests.
While H&D readers can celebrate the fact that Sinn Féin has lost many votes due to its pro-immigration stance and general wokeism – and SF’s former Westminster MP Michelle Gildernew hilariously failed in her bid for a European seat – it would sadly be wrong to conclude that any coherent anti-immigration movement has yet emerged.
In the European elections, the tragi-comic National Party’s competing factions polled 0.8% and 0.7% of first preferences in the Dublin constituency; and 0.6% and 0.5% in the Midlands/NW constituency. In the South constituency neither faction put up a candidate.
(Bear in mind that in both the European and local council elections in Ireland, the STV electoral system helps smaller parties to maximise their support, because there is no such thing as a “wasted vote” – unlike in the UK’s first-past-the-post system where smaller parties usually struggle for credibility.)
In the local elections, the deputy leader of the Reynolds faction of the NP (Patrick Quinlan) did manage to win one of the five seats in the Blanchardstown-Mulhuddart ward of Fingal County Council, to the west of Dublin. Parts of this area have suffered serious deprivation and crime problems for decades: some of the background to recent anti-immigrant riots involves conflict between native Irish gangsters and imported criminals.
But this was the only success for either National Party faction across the whole of Ireland.
The Irish Freedom Party – which is the main voice of the ‘Irexit’ movement and has also adopted a milder version of anti-immigration policies – also won just one council seat in the entire country. This was in the Palmerstown-Fonthill ward of South Dublin County Council.
In the Lifford-Stranorlar ward of Donegal County Council, the independent anti-immigration campaigner Niall McConnell (known to some H&D readers for his online broadcasts where he has interviewed several prominent figures on the right) polled 7.7% of first preferences. He picked up about one-fifth of the transfers from the more ‘moderate’ conservative party Aontú, and a few transfers from a protest vote party that campaigns on housing issues, but these transfers were nowhere near enough to gain Mr McConnell a seat.
In the European elections, the Irish Freedom Party polled 0.9% in Dublin, 2.0% in Midlands/NW (where their candidate was the party leader Hermann Kelly, once associated with Nigel Farage), and 1.8% in South.
A smaller fringe party involved in the anti-immgration protests, ‘The Irish People’ fared even worse with 0.7% in Midlands/NW; 0.7% in South; and 0.5% in Dublin.
In most of the country, the more substantial electoral challenges came from longer-established parties and independents who combined an element of anti-immigration politics with traditional Catholicism, and in several cases had a background in the IRA or other anti-British, republican terrorist causes. British patriots should be very careful indeed in welcoming these successes, since regardless of their stance on immigration, many of these Irish ‘nationalist’ individuals and parties are fundamentally our enemies.
Aontú, led by a former Sinn Féin activist and including defectors from both Sinn Féin and the traditional conservative-republican party Fianna Fáil, polled 2.8% in Dublin; 6.0% in Midlands/NW (where their candidate was party leader Peader Toíbín); and 2.1% in South. They retained several local council seats.
The strongest results for the Irish ‘right’ were obtained by Independent Ireland (a party created last November by reactionary conservative businessmen who had fallen out with the old gang parties) and by various other independent candidates who became well-known for their roles in the recent referendum campaign, where Irish voters resisted demands for wokeist changes to their country’s constitution.
Two independent candidates were elected to Dublin City Council, including Malachy Steenson who describes himself as a ‘republican socialist’ and was a veteran activist in the ‘Official IRA’ and its Marxist political front, the Workers Party (known as ‘the Stickies’), but now associates with a jumble of anti-woke causes as well as versions of Marxist republicanism.
In Dublin’s four-member European constituency, Independent Ireland’s candidate – radio celebrity Niall Boylan – finished fifth after transfers from other conservative and anti-immigration candidates just failed to gain him a seat. Boylan had taken 8.1% of first preference votes.
Peter Casey, a wealthy right-wing conservative, polled 3.1% in Midlands/NW, where the strongest broadly ‘right-wing’/conservative candidate was Independent Ireland’s Ciaran Mullooly with 8.4%. Mullooly, who like his colleague in Dublin is a former journalist and broadcaster, was eventually elected in fifth place, while Sinn Féin lost their seat. This means that Michelle Gildernew, who gave up her Westminster post as Sinn Féin MP for Fermanagh & South Tyrone to contest this European seat in the Republic, is now unemployed!
Similarly in South, barrister and independent candidate Michael McNamara (a former Labour politician who was one of the leaders of the anti-woke ‘No’ campaign in the recent constitutional referendum) eventually won one of the five European seats after polling 8.2% of first preferences and picking up many transfers from defeated ‘right-wing’ candidates. The far-left Putinist MEP Mick Wallace lost his seat, as did his fellow Putinist Clare Daly in Dublin.
Unsurprisingly, reactionary conservative forces whose main concern is preserving Ireland’s traditional Catholic social values, have proved to be a far stronger political movement than those who are mainly concerned with immigration.
European right advances, but what does the ‘right’ now stand for?
Several anti-immigration parties increased their votes substantially in the European Parliamentary elections, where votes were counted overnight on Sunday and Monday. Results in Ireland are still awaited, but as we explain elsewhere on this site, it’s already clear that the radical wing of the Irish anti-immigration movement has failed to fulfil expectations.
As explained in the forthcoming issue of our magazine, the most important aspect of these European elections is not so much the result for individual parties in particular countries, but whether it will be possible to build a cross-party alliance in the European Parliament that is able to exert meaningful pressure on immigration policy and related matters.
Key problems here include bitter divisions among European nationalists (partly though not exclusively related to different attitudes to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine), as well as the underlying reality that the European Parliament has limited powers even over European Union institutions.
That’s why we have described last night’s results as a matter of protest, rather than power.
Nevertheless, these votes are a heartening indication of the tide of opinion among Europeans, especially among younger voters.
Tomorrow belongs to us!
Anti-immigration parties advance in European elections: but this is protest, not power
Broadly as predicted, anti-immigration parties from what the media term the ‘far right’ have made big advances at the European Parliamentary elections – though the biggest winners overall were conservative parties; the ‘far right’ itself doesn’t exist as a coherent force; and the European Parliament has very limited powers.
[Please note that some of the statistics below might be altered very slightly as final checks are made to election counts. Ireland’s results are not yet available but we shall report on them later today.]
First the good news. In France, Marine Le Pen’s RN (successor to the National Front) was easily the largest party overnight with 31.4%, ahead of President Macron’s ‘centrist’ party on 14.6%, and the slowly recovering Socialists on 13.8%. The far-left party France Insoumise is now obviously in decline after several years as the leading force on the French left: they polled 9.9%. And France still has the weakest mainstream conservative party in Europe – the Republicans, who took just 7.2%.
France is one of the few European countries that has not just one but two electorally credible ‘far right’ parties. In fact until Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it had seemed likely that the new Reconquête party led by the Jewish journalist Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal, would overtake Le Pen’s party. However, while Le Pen swiftly condemned Putin, Zemmour found it much more difficult to escape the electoral consequences of his earlier Putinism, and his party swiftly declined.
Reconquête are both harder line than RN against immigration (especially against Islam) and more traditionally conservative (in an Anglo-American, quasi-Thatcherite sense) on economic matters, while Le Pen has taken her party onto quasi-socialist turf and has become the natural leader of French workers.
This week Zemmour and Maréchal were (just about) able to celebrate. Together with the Greens, they just scraped over the 5% threshold and will have five MEPs, including both Maréchal and Zemmour’s partner Sarah Knafo.
Within hours of polls closing, President Macron called a snap general election. This will of course be a parliamentary not presidential election, since under the French system Macron will remain in office as President (and ultimately in control of foreign policy etc.) regardless of who becomes Prime Minister. But there is now a very real (though outside) possibility that Marine Le Pen will be Prime Minister of France within a few weeks.
While France continues to demonstrate the electoral toxicity of Putinism, it’s a very different story in Germany, where two blatantly pro-Moscow parties polled very well. AfD (Alternative for Germany) was originally a Thatcherite conservative party, but quickly became an anti-immigration party in opposition to the treachery of former Chancellor Angela Merkel.
This week, despite various scandals that have beset the party leadership with (for once) justified media exposés of their shady connections to both China and Russia, AfD polled 15.9% and overtook Chancellor Olof Scholz’s party SPD who fell to 13.9%. The mainstream conservative alliance CDU-CSU were easily the largest force with 30%, while the Greens (Scholz’s coalition partners) fell to 11.9%.
Very predictably the Homeland Party (which is the renamed NPD, Germany’s oldest surviving nationalist party) collapsed even further to a record low of 0.1% (27th of the 35 party lists, down among the joke and ego-trip parties). The good news is that the old NPD / Homeland is disappearing. The radical challenge to the corrupt AfD in future will come from the new party Dritte Weg, a party which stands for traditional nationalism, rejects Putinism, and is attracting growing numbers of young activists, though of course it didn’t contest the European election and is just at the stage of beginning to fight local and regional campaigns.
Another interesting development was the collapse of the Left Party (Die Linke, which was formed soon after the semi-reunification of Germany in the 1990s as an alliance of old communists and hardline socialists) to only 2.7%. Luckily for them Germany, unlike France, has no electoral threshold – so they will retain three MEPs, at least until 2029 when a new threshold system will be introduced.
Most of the old Left Party vote went to a new party created by one of their former leaders, the half-Iranian Sahra Wagenknecht, who is a long-term Russian asset and unsurprisingly shares AfD’s Putinism, while taking a Stalinist line in other policy areas.
Wagenknecht’s party polled 6.2% nationwide and was especially strong in parts of the former East Germany. In Thuringia, for example, AfD was the largest party with 30.7%, while Wagenknecht’s BSW polled 15%.
One consequence of AfD’s pro-Moscow stance is that it will have few friends in the new Parliament, having been shunned by most other anti-immigration / nationalist parties.
H&D will report further in the coming weeks and months on the reshaping of the European right.
In the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen’s allies in the PVV (Freedom Party), led by Geert Wilders, finished second with 17.7%, a huge advance on its disappointing European election performance five years ago, though slightly down on their 23.5% in last year’s Dutch general election.
The rival Dutch nationalist party FvD (Forum for Democracy) whose leader Thierry Baudet once seemed a credible successor to Wilders as an anti-immigration leader but rapidly declined into fringe conspiracy theories and Putinism, collapsed from 11% to 2.5% and will no longer have any MEPs.
In Belgium, the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang (another important Le Pen ally) might have emerged the largest single party in one of Europe’s most politically fragmented countries, though final results are not yet clear. VB polled 13.9% but there were also big gains for the more ‘moderate’ Flemish nationalist/conservative party N-VA (New Flemish Alliance) who are only a fraction behind VB and in final results might yet overtake them.
Austria saw a historic success for another Le Pen ally, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), who in a close three-way split have emerged as the largest party with 25.7%. Despite this victory, if they wish to be influential in the new Parliament they will have to watch their step on foreign policy, as Le Pen and her allies have indicated they will be utterly ruthless in expelling any party that discredits the anti-immigration cause by getting too close to Moscow.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni – the effective leader of the mainstream European right (i.e. of the block that stands to the right of conservatism and is at least nominally anti-immigration, while avoiding ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’ overtones) – had another election success. Her party ‘Brothers of Italy’ (Fratelli d’Italia) took 28.8%, ahead of the centre-left PD on 24%. A long-way behind these two were the once-successful but now declining anti-system protest party Five Star Movement on 10.0%, and then Meloni’s coalition partners Lega and Forza Italia, on 9.0% and 9.6% respectively.
Forza Italia is the remnant of the late Silvio Berlusconi’s reactionary conservative party, while Lega‘s leader Matteo Salvini was once the highest profile anti-immigration politician in Italy, but has long since been overshadowed by Meloni. Almost as much as Zemmour in France, Salvini has had to live down his former Putinism.
Meloni’s main political allies in the outgoing Parliament were the conservative-populist former governing party in Poland, Law and Justice. They lost power in last October’s Polish general election, and remained in second place yesterday with 35.7%, just behind the liberal/centrist slate ‘Civic Coalition’.
A rival Polish populist movement known as Confederation bounced back from several years of internal party conflict, polling 11.8% and gaining six MEPs. It’s not clear with whom they will ally in the new Parliament, as their political positions are anti-immigration, economically libertarian, and anti-Putin.
The strength of the anti-immigration right in the European Parliament will now depend to a large extent on whether Le Pen and Meloni can work together, or whether Europe’s conservative establishment manage to co-opt Meloni and some other quasi-nationalist parties.
Among the latter, one of the most widely publicised is in Spain whose reactionary conservative party Vox is a typical example of the trend towards pro-Israel, pro-capitalist stances among quasi-nationalist parties. Vox advanced from 6.2% (four MEPs) in 2019 to 9.6% (six MEPs) yesterday, barely justifying the hype it has been given in the media, but the big winners in Spain were the mainstream conservative PP, whose vote shot up from 20.2% to 34.2%.
Crank conspiracy theories embraced by some in our own movement were represented on Spanish ballot papers by a new party SALF (‘The Party is Over’), founded by an ideologically shallow social media celebrity, Alvise Pérez. A decade ago Peréz was a student in England at Leeds University, where he was active in the Liberal Democrats, and he later joined the Lib Dems’s short-lived Spanish equivalent Ciudadanos (Citizens).
His more recent success in building a political movement on the back of online conspiracy theorising and stunts, merely demonstrates the political idiocy of a large section of the ‘dissident’ movement, including the so-called ‘alt right’. Pérez’s party polled 4.6%, enough to gain three MEPs.
As usual the fringe right in Spain – a party that claims to represent the Falangist tradition – polled a tiny vote, amounting to just 0.05%.
In Portugal Vox’s imitator CHEGA (which translates as “Enough”, as in “We’ve had enough!”) polled 9.8%, up from 1.5% in 2019 when the party had only just been formed and was part of a hastily patched up joint ‘right-wing’ slate.
Croatia is one of several European countries where the broad right has reorganised itself in recent years. The largest party that represents traditional Croatian nationalist views is the Homeland Movement, who polled 8.8%, enough to elect one MEP.
Greece has seen some of the most blatant interference with ‘democratic’ politics. At the 2014 election, the national socialist party Golden Dawn polled 9.4% and elected three MEPs. This was one of several strong election results for Golden Dawn during the 2010s, but the party was subjected both to violent attack from left-wing terrorists, and to legalistic attack by the Greek state. As a result its leaders found themselves in jail and the party was effectively banned.
At yesterday’s election the main anti-immigration party was Greek Solution, though it’s a reactionary rather than national socialist party, and has expressed Putinist foreign policy positions. They polled 9.5% yesterday.
Cyprus has an anti-immigration party once seen as allied to Golden Dawn. This is the National Popular Front (ELAM): they polled 11.2% yesterday, up from 8.3% in 2019.
In Malta a national-socialist party allied to Golden Dawn – Imperium Europa, led by Norman Lowell – polled 3.2% in 2019. This year that fell slightly to 2.6%.
Among advances for anti-immigration parties, in Finland the Finns Party lost one of their seats, with their vote declining to 7.6% as voters rallied behind the government’s strongly anti-Moscow stance. To be fair, the Finns Party are also strongly anti-Putin, but in a country on the frontline at a time of crisis, there is a tendency to rally behind the government. In this respect Germany is the exception, because decades of brainwashing have taught Germans that they aren’t allowed to take a strong military stance against their enemies. Finnish patriots haven’t been emasculated.
In Sweden the main anti-immigration party Sweden Democrats polled 13.2%, very slightly down on their historic success in 2019.
Similarly in Denmark the Danish People’s Party fell slightly from 10.8% to 6.4%.
While some ‘mainstream’ anti-immigration parties can seem discreditable and cowardly, one of the most honourable and courageous of these parties is in Estonia, where the Conservative People’s Party (EKRE) advanced to 14.9%, from 12.7% in 2019.
In neighbouring Latvia the anti-immigration party National Alliance similarly advanced to 22.1%, from 16.5% five years ago.
For complicated geopolitical and historical reasons, the position in the third Baltic republic, Lithuania, is more nuanced. There, the largest of several ‘right-wing’ parties also represents the interests of ethnic Poles. (It should be remembered that during the 16th-17th centuries, during what we in the UK think of as the Elizabethean and Jacobean eras, the confederation Poland-Lithuania was one of the greatest powers in Europe.)
This Polish-Lithuanian party LLRA-KSS polled 5.8% this year, a fraction up from 2014. The rest of the Lithuanian ‘right’ is fragmented, with the National Alliance (a relatively new party founded in 2016), for example, polling 3.8%.
With most of the electorally credible ‘right’ (outside Germany) having moved against Putin, Hungary‘s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is in a delicate position. His party Fidesz remained easily the largest force at yesterday’s election, polling 44.3%, while the once-effective but now marginal nationalist party Jobbik managed only 1%. But it’s not yet clear with whom Fidesz‘s MEPs will ally in the new Parliament.
One of the few openly Putinist parties in the new Parliament is from Bulgaria, where the ‘Revival’ party polled 15.4%, a huge increase on their 1% in 2019 and reflecting the traditional instability of Bulgarian politics where wild swings of this kind are not uncommon. These Bulgarian Putinists are unlikely to find many allies in the new Parliament, unless AfD choose to go into the wilderness with them.
Romania‘s new populist ‘right-wing’ party AUR has adopted a softer form of Putinism, seeking to undermine Europe’s support for Ukraine without being blatantly pro-Moscow. As in much of South-Eastern Europe, the position is complicated by petty nationalism / chauvinism, with AUR for example promoting anti-Hungarian themes. (A lot of this is rooted in disputes going back to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the redrawing of Europe’s map following the First World War.)
AUR polled 15% but unlike the Bulgarian ‘Revival’ party it’s likely to moderate its stance on foreign policy, so as to remain part of one of the mainstream pan-nationalist or conservative groups in the new Parliament.
Slovakia‘s politics hit the headlines last month with the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Robert Fico, whose party Smer is difficult to place on the ideological map, being both left-wing and populist/’nationalist’. Smer was the second-largest party yesterday, polling 24.8%. As with the Romanian AUR, it might moderate its stance on the war in Ukraine so as to be admitted into one of the cross-party groups in the new Parliament, but since it was until recently in the same group as the UK Labour Party, it’s far from clear where it would naturally belong!
The more hardline nationalist party SNS (Slovak National Party), who back in 2014 were strong enough to elect an MEP), polled only 1.9% yesterday. Another Slovakian party, Freedom & Solidarity, represents a very different type of ‘right-wing'” socially libertarian, Eurosceptic, and ‘right-wing’ on economics in a US-style, pro-capitalist sense. They polled 4.9% yesterday.
Politics in the Czech Republic is another area that can mystify racial nationalist observers in other countries. The main anti-immigration party Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD – allied to Marine Le Pen’s RN, Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party, and other such forces in the European Parliament) is led by the quarter-Japanese, quarter-Korean, half-Czech, Tomio Okamura.
Last year one of their two MEPs, retired general Hynek Blaško, broke away to form a blatantly Putinist party but obtained a humiliating 0.5% yesterday. Meanwhile his former party fell to 5.7%, but will retain one MEP.
In Slovenia there is very little that could be termed a ‘nationalist’ party. The tiny Slovenian National Party split again a few years ago, and one of its activists founded a libertarian and anti-lockdown party ‘Resni.ca‘. They polled 4% yesterday, not enough to gain an MEP.
Luxembourg has no significant anti-immigration party, and its largest ‘right-wing’ force is a party that mainly represents the interests of pensioners, the mildly populist ADR, which polled 11.8% yesterday, enough to elect one MEP who will probably ally with Meloni’s ‘moderate’ nationalist group if it remains in its present form.
H&D will continue to monitor developments in Europe during the coming weeks, and will report on the reshaping of the electorally-focused side of European nationalism both here and in future editions of the magazine.
The chaotic truth about Irish ‘nationalism’
On 7th June the Republic of Ireland will have local council elections as well as electing the fourteen Irish members of the European Parliament. Will some form of racial nationalism prove stronger in Ireland than it was in last week’s English local elections?
As regular H&D readers will know, racial nationalist politics in England is struggling to recover from damage inflicted more than a decade ago. This weakness was reflected in last week’s council contests.
Online racial nationalist commentators have become very excited in recent months about Irish resistance to mass immigration and ‘wokeism’, especially after recent demonstrations in central Dublin; the decisive defeat in referendums on 8th March of two attempts to liberalise the Irish constitution in the direction of feminism and ‘LGBT’ rights; and anti-immigration riots in Dublin last November.
Close examination of political reality, however, suggests that these commentators have vastly overrated racial nationalism in Ireland, and that in fact our movement on the other side of the Irish Sea (whether broadly defined as anti-immigration, anti-woke and socially conservative, or narrowly defined as racial nationalist) is organisationally and electorally weaker even than the movement in England.
When it comes to the electoral side of politics, racial nationalists in 2024 tend to have only a childish level of understanding, partly because a generation has grown up informed by online speculation rather than experience.
This gets worse when overseas observers look at the UK and Ireland, for several reasons. One is the Anglophobia which colours many overseas perspectives on the Irish question, especially in Catholic countries and/or among a generation of 21st century ‘nationalists’ who think in ‘Third Worldist’ or ‘anti-imperialist’ terms, and for whom the Irish are lionised as heroes of an anti-imperialist, anti-British struggle.
Another problem is that racial nationalists persistently overrate street demonstrations. Racial nationalists will tend to get more excited by a group marching down the street with banners, or shouting in a city centre, or even throwing petrol bombs, than by a political party building support with a properly organised branch structure nationwide, or engaging in serious ideological training of its cadres.
Partly this is due to learning the wrong lessons from a Hollywood version of national socialism. And partly it’s because (for younger movement activists especially) politics conducted in the style of football hooliganism is more exciting than educating themselves ideologically, attending meetings, and building support among the general public.
Therefore both the English Defence League and assorted anti-vaccination campaigns attracted support from racial nationalists, even though their respective causes were ideologically confused (at best), and despite the style of their activism being counter-productive and off-putting to the vast majority of Britons.
Perceptions of Irish anti-immigration politics are similarly unrealistic. What is actually happening in the southern portion of the Emerald Isle?
Nominations have now closed for the European elections, and though there is another week before local council nominations close, most parties have announced their candidates.
At the European election Ireland is divided into three giant constituencies, using the Single Transferable Vote method, which allows voters to list candidates in order of preference (and to choose between the candidates offered by each party rather than accepting the priority listed by the party).
Dublin elects four MEPs, and the other two regions (Midlands/NW and South) five each. In practice STV means that a winning candidate needs both a fairly solid level of first preference support, and a certain level of appeal to supporters of rival candidates giving their second preferences, etc.
The positive aspect of this system for any well-organised anti-immigration party is that there is no such thing as a ‘wasted vote’ under STV, so really there is no excuse for the ‘right’ not to poll its maximum vote.
In Dublin this year there will be no fewer than eight rival slates standing for varying types of anti-immigration policies and social conservatism.
Some of these are old-fashioned Catholic reactionaries, emphasising an anti-abortion and anti-LGBT agenda, but also including aspects of anti-immigration politics. Others are closer to Reform UK and are linked to opposing the European Union (though calls for ‘Irexit’ remain quite marginal). And one or two are something resembling a racial nationalist movement, but divisions within that scene are even more bitter and intense than anything we see in the UK.
For example the closest thing to a racial nationalist party in Ireland used to be the National Party, but this has split into two factions, each of which seek to use the party name, and each of which are standing in Dublin, both for the European Parliament and in the city council elections.
The hostility between the two National Party factions has descended to a tragi-comic level, with the rival leaders engaged in legal battles over ownership of a stock of gold bars stored in an Irish bank vault. The farcical situation can be seen in the video above where Justin Barrett (leader of one faction) attacks his rival James Reynolds.
A third faction (which includes some former National Party members) has formed the Ireland First party, whose leader is a noted Putinist and whose Dublin candidate was a prominent anti-vaccination campaigner.
Anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists are also involved in a fourth group calling itself ‘The Irish People’. Their Dublin candidate Andy Heasman was involved in the recent anti-immigration demonstration, but so were representatives of other factions, including several who will be rivalling Heasman on the European ballot paper next month.
Independent Ireland – a social conservative party that has been involved in anti-abortion activism – is also on the ballot, as is the larger social conservative party Aontú which has had candidates in both the Republic and Northern Ireland (though of course Northern Ireland like the rest of the UK is no longer part of the European Union so has no elections on 7th June).
Farage-style, anti-EU politics is represented on the ballot by the Irish Freedom Party.
And last but (in his own eyes) not least, is independent candidate Malachy Steenson, a veteran leftwinger who has reinvented himself as a populist conservative and anti-abortion activist. Steenson was once a leading activist in Republican Sinn Féin, political wing of the terrorist splinter group ‘Continuity IRA’.
Similar patterns are repeated in the other two constituencies. In the Midlands/NW constituency the two rival ‘leaders’ of the factions who each claim the name ‘National Party’ (Justin Barrett and James Reynolds) are standing against each other. The leader of Aontú, Peadar Tóibin, is also on the ballot paper in Midlands/NW, as are candidates from ‘The Irish People’, ‘Independent Ireland’, and ‘Ireland First’.
A fourth ‘right-wing’ party leader is also on the ballot in the Midlands/NW constituency: Nigel Farage’s Irish ally Hermann Kelly, leader of the Irish Freedom Party.
In the South constituency several of the right-wing parties are again present, with the exception of the National Party, neither of whose factions are standing. Also on the ballot in the South is the barrister Michael McNamara, who was one of the leaders of the winning ‘No’ campaign against the proposed feminist and LGBT constitutional changes in this year’s referendum. McNamara is already a member of the Dublin Parliament.
At the previous European Election in Dublin the Greens won most first preferences – 17.5%. Then the two old parties (Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil) in second and third. The far-left Independents for Change polled 11.6%, ahead of Sinn Féin.
Eventually the Sinn Féin second preferences split very heavily in favour of Independents for Change, pushing them ahead of Fianna Fáil into third place.
Because of their extreme Putinism, I very much doubt Independents for Change will poll as well this time. A lot of their vote will go instead to the Trotskyist party, People Before Profit, or back to Sinn Féin.
The ‘shock’ for H&D readers (and for racial nationalists worldwide who entertain delusions about the strength of racial nationalism in Ireland) will be that despite all the demonstrations, riots, and online noise, Sinn Féin’s vote will increase in June, compared to the last Euro election in 2019.
Readers can probably perceive what a shambles this is. In theory STV would allow all of these ‘right wing’ votes to transfer eventually to the strongest candidate/party (which would almost certainly be Aontú), but it’s more likely to end up a total failure and a triumph for the establishment parties, with the most substantial challenge to the political elite coming from the far left rather than from the broadly defined ‘right’.
At local level, ‘Independent Ireland’ are defending thirteen seats – former independent or Fianna Fáil councillors who defected to the new party mostly in rural areas. As with the European seats (though of course on a smaller scale) local councillors in Ireland are elected in multi-member LEAs using the STV system, which unlike the English first-past-the-post system means that smaller parties (including the ‘far right’) do not have to combat the ‘wasted vote’ argument.
But given the chaos outlined above, it would be unrealistic to expect any significant breakthrough even at local council level for any of the tiny, disorganised and squabbling anti-immigration factions.
