Political soothsaying for 2020
At the beginning of 2018, Paddy Power was offering the same odds, 4/1, against a general election happening in Ireland in either 2019 or 2020. When 2018 bowed out without an election, the odds against one in 2019 had narrowed to 5/2, but the odds about 2020 had narrowed even more to 8/15 (i.e., 65% probability).
Heading into 2020 itself, the Paddy Power website odds on an election this year have narrowed to 1/25 (96% probability) with the second quarter of the year favoured at 4/7 (63% probability). And that makes sense. Get the exit in Brexit out of the way (even if it’s only a stage on a longer journey), current Dáil loose ends tidied up, more of a stretch in the evenings and a few extra degrees of warmth first.
This time last year, Paddy Power saw a Fine Gael led government as the more likely outcome of the election. A Fine Gael minority was at 7/2 and both a rerun of the current Fine Gael-Independents arrangement and a Fine Gael-Sinn Féin coalition were each on offer at 5/1. The shortest price odds against a Fianna Fáil led government were 13/2 against a “grand coalition” with Fine Gael, a Fianna Fáil-Sinn Féin coalition following closely behind at 7/1.
As the sun sets on 2019, Michael Martin has, in the bookie’s estimation, got the tip of his nose in front in the “race” to be Taoiseach. He is 4/5 (55.5% probability) with Leo Varadkar at 5/6 (54.5% probability). The bookmaker presumes that neither centre party will ditch their leader either ahead of the election or in its immediate aftermath. You can get 33/1 against Simon Coveney being the next Taoiseach (worth a second thought maybe), 50/1 against Michael McGrath with Mary Lou McDonald further away in the rear view mirror at 66/1.
If Paddy Power is offering odds on the shape of the next government, it is not publishing them on its website. But it is offering a punt on which party will get the most seats. Having deemed Michael Martin the more likely Taoiseach, it expects Fine Gael to get more seats; 4/5 versus 5/6 for Fianna Fáil, exactly the reverse of the balance between Michael Martin and Leo Varadkar in the contest for Taoiseach.
That raises an eyebrow because, prima facie, you would expect the party with more seats to be in pole position to lead the government. But two possible supplementary presumptions could explain this apparent contradiction.
The first is that neither of the main parties is likely to win enough seats to be able to form a sustainable cohesive coalition easily. Presuming both main parties remain immune to any wooing from Sinn Féin, the next government is likely to be a rerun of the present one, a minority coalition depending on a confidence and supply arrangement with the leading opposition party.
The polls indicate that the main parties might expect to poll in the range of 25–30% of first preferences which would translate to anywhere from 50–60 seats each, well short of 79, the magic number required for an overall majority.
Second, the bookie may believe smaller parties like Labour and the Greens will find Michael Martin more “user friendly” than Leo Varadkar and be more open to coalition with Fianna Fáil even if it has slightly fewer seats than Fine Gael.
Like Paddy Power, the opinion polls suggest Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are “neck and neck” or, to resort to another cliché, that the race between them for more seats is “too close to call”. Fine Gael led in every poll from July 2017, shortly after Mr. Varadkar’s ascent to leadership, until March 2019 since when there has been no consistent pattern to the polls. Common denominator conventional wisdom, among pundits, supported by the 4 by-election results in November, seems to be that Mr. Varadkar is now facing into the wind that is at Mr. Martin’s back.
Uncertainty about the outcome of their personal contest may be exciting, but it makes little real difference whether Mr. Martin or Mr. Varadkar wins.
Fine Gael might claim to have stronger front bench, but they have the advantage of being “busy” and “doing things” in government, though some of what they have been “doing” has sullied rather than enhanced their reputations. Does Simon Harris look any better in Health than anybody in his long line of hapless predecessors including the Taoiseach whose main achievement was to be anonymous in the role. For all his buzzing business, has Richard Bruton actually achieved anything at all?
Fianna Fáil might claim to be fresher, leaner and hungrier after nine years twiddling their thumbs in opposition but then “twiddling their thumbs” is exactly what these self-styled greyhounds have been doing. Of serious and imaginative alternative policy, there has been almost none.
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael might owe their origins as separate parties to the treaty and civil war divisions of century ago, but those are irrelevant now. They are both centrist and managerialist, with some catchment in all social sectors established by geography, class, occupation, age or gender, their role being to provide a competitive alternative, not a contrast, to the other, just as Pepsi stands in opposition to Coke, Lidl to Aldi and Liverpool to Everton.
From the left, the call is occasionally heard that the lack of real policy or ideological difference between the two parties implies an obligation on them to bury their perceived differences and merge. This is self-serving nonsense from parties anxious only to broaden their own target market.
It’s not as if the Left offers a viable alternative candidate government to the former civil war parties in the way that the British Labour party (even in its current dishevelled state) stands in relation to the Tories. Sinn Féin apart (and it is more if not entirely a party of the left), the “left” in Ireland comprises an archipelago of small cabals united only in their oppositionalism and divided only by personality clashes and intellectual nuance indiscernible to anybody outside the fold, captives to the history of their broad ideology never amounting to more than a narrow minority interest here. Non-aspirant writers, they are settled critics; aspirant marathon winners but too settled in their armchairs to train.
Nothing is impossible and Sinn Féin may sometime have genuine aspirations to lead a government if not achieve an overall majority of seats, but that is certainly not a prospect for the forthcoming election.
A rerun of the present minority government even under different leadership will provide consensual continuity, a quality not to be underestimated when one looks at the factious discordant political theatre across the Atlantic Ocean and the Irish Sea. But the handmaiden of that virtue is the vice of timidity. Like the current one, the next government will be captive to common denominator, watery “solutions”, tiller adjustments rather than entirely new directions. Bigger, tougher, complex challenges will be either only tinkered with or long-grassed altogether; pensions, third level funding, climate change, along with the hottest current buttons of health, housing and homelessness. Like governments across Europe, ours will continue to prioritise the interests of the elderly who vote over those of the young who don’t or can’t.
The World Bank’s most recent figures (2018) for GDP per capita standardised on a purchasing power parity basis place Ireland fourth in the world behind Qatar, Luxembourg and Singapore. Of course, GDP exaggerates the extent of “wealth” generated here and I doubt if many feel as well off personally as that statistic implies. But the degree to which people feel their personal circumstances have improved since the trough of the crash and the extent to which they prefer to hold onto their private “wealth” even at the risk of greater public squalor will be critical factors in the election.
We all want more as well as better services but are not so enthusiastic about paying for them, partly because successive governments have failed to convince that Euros entrusted to them deliver better value than Euros kept in our own pockets. Both parties face obstacles in persuading that they can manage the public purse efficiently and effectively. Fianna Fáil’s oversight of our bust is gone but not forgotten. Fine Gael is burdened by the millstone of the Children’s Hospital.
Of course, political parties will at least murmur if not shout that hard choices are not required, that the gravity-defying triad of lower taxes, more welfare benefits and better services is not a three-card trick. One lives in hope if not expectation that that dog has had its day.
