How Sinn Féin Blew It
And what other parties can learn from its failure
For most of the last few years, Ireland was braced for a political earthquake. It looked inevitable that the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael duopoly, which in one form or another has led every government in the history of the state, would finally be broken up. Sinn Féin, the left-wing voice of opposition, enjoyed a gaping lead in the polls. At last it seemed their day had come.
It wasn’t to be. November’s election returned Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to government once again, this time propped up by a smattering of independents rather than Greens. Less a political earthquake, more a mild tremor. Despite its mid-cycle dominance in the polls, Sinn Féin finished third. For the first time since the 1980s, its share of the vote declined compared to the previous election. So - what went wrong?
Anxiety about immigration
Sinn Féin’s poll lead began to dwindle in late 2023. It is not hard to identify the catalyst. On 23rd November, a man stabbed three children and their carer outside a primary school in Dublin city centre. Misinformation about the attacker percolated online, including that he was an illegal immigrant. Far-right agitators organised a protest which rapidly devolved into criminality. Looting, assaults on Gardaí and arson were rife.
The Dublin riot had an immediate and profound effect on Irish politics. Polls released in the weeks afterwards showed the proportion of people ranking immigration as a top political issue break 10% for the first time.1 In the same polls, support for Sinn Féin fell to its lowest level in three years. Over the following months, the salience of immigration continued to rise and, as the party was forced to clarify its stance on the issue, Sinn Féin’s support continued to slip.
There is good evidence that many of the voters who deserted Sinn Féin during this period did so out of dissatisfaction with its position on migration and asylum. In particular, voters who drifted away from the party were more likely to hold strong, negative views about immigration. Data from a survey conducted by the Irish Electoral Commission in July 2024 illustrate this point nicely. This poll shows that in the European Parliament election, past Sinn Féin voters who no longer supported the party were more than twice as likely as loyal Sinn Féin voters to cite immigration as the most important issue to them (39% compared to 16%). These lapsed Sinn Féin voters were also much more likely to hold negative views about immigrants and refugees than voters who stuck with the party. For instance, 41% of lapsed Sinn Féin voters disagreed that “racial and cultural diversity in Ireland now makes it a better place to live” compared to just 27% of loyal Sinn Féin voters. On immigration, the voters Sinn Féin lost were to the right, on average, of the voters it retained.2
Once gone, these voters were almost impossible to win back. As Rory Costello points out in an excellent essay, lapsed Sinn Féin voters who prioritised immigration in the poll discussed above were even less favourable towards the party than those who never voted for it. These lapsed supporters were not just grumpy with Sinn Féin, but completely alienated. As a result, they did not return to the fold even as the salience of immigration diminished in the months before polling day.
An unsustainable coalition
On this evidence, it is tempting to attribute Sinn Féin’s electoral woes to its failure to pivot rightward on immigration. That temptation was too strong for some in the media to resist, but in reality Sinn Féin was doomed no matter how it responded to the rising prominence of immigration.
To see why, consider the chart below. It shows the distribution of Sinn Féin voters from 2020 by their perception of the economic and social effects of immigration, with darker shades denoting more voters.3 In the bottom left corner is the pocket of voters with a negative attitude towards immigration, most of whom abandoned the party in the aftermath of the Dublin riot. But there is also a high concentration of voters in the opposite corner who view immigration positively. In fact, Sinn Féin’s 2020 electoral coalition pulled together voters from right across the spectrum on immigration. This was only possible because immigration was not a major issue in that campaign. So when it became a major issue, Sinn Féin’s coalition was bound to break apart.
Every other major party’s support base from 2020 was relatively cohesive on immigration. For Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, and the Greens, it is easy to imagine a policy offering and communication strategy that could avoid alienating many voters. But Sinn Féin faced a dilemma: either adopt a moderate approach and anger voters on the right, or take a harder line and risk estranging its progressive wing. Neither option was conducive to electoral success. Had it taken the latter approach, it might have been even more decisively spurned.
A cautionary tale
What can political parties learn from Sinn Féin’s flop? The main lesson is that some electoral coalitions are single-use only. In 2020, Sinn Féin achieved its best-ever result by cobbling together supporters from across the political spectrum who were aggrieved at the government. But this was not a solid foundation to build on. Instead, it was what James Kanagasooriam would call a “sandcastle coalition”. When the wind changed, it crumbled.
Sinn Féin is not the only party to have seen its support base fracture as voters shift their priorities. Boris Johnson romped to victory in the 2019 UK General Election by wooing first-time Conservative voters and loyalists alike with the promise to get Brexit done. Once Brexit was out of the way, these voters had little in common, and the coalition splintered. In an era of increasing voter volatility, more and more parties will face this problem. A message that resonates in one campaign may fall flat in the next. Electoral coalitions need to be built and rebuilt. Parties that fail to adapt, like Sinn Féin, will find their success is fleeting.
These data from Ipsos / Behaviour and Attitudes are based on verbatim responses to the question: “What have you come across in what the Government has said or done recently, that has made you think the country is going in the right or wrong direction?”
A better way to make this point would be to compare loyal Sinn Féin supporters with those who supported the party just before the Dublin riot - but I couldn’t get the data.
To be specific, on the horizontal axis is the arithmetic mean of voters’ strength of agreement with statements about the effect of immigration on jobs and the economy. The vertical axis is based on statements about immigration’s impact on local communities and the value of cultural diversity. All questions are taken from the National Election and Democracy Study by the Electoral Commission.
The R code used to produce the heat maps for this piece, along with much of the code used in this blog, is available on GitHub.