Ireland Shows Europe’s Silenced Majority Spoiling for a Fight

The keyword in the title is "silenced". The voters in many Western countries no longer feel their votes count for anything and are finding different ways to express that, including spoilt ballots.

From The European Conservative

By Mick Hume

The “staggering” number of spoilt votes in the Irish presidential election is another sign of the widening gap between the people and the EU elites.

Since the EU elections of June 2024, I have written about the emergence of Two Europes. On one side there is the old, official Europe, run by EU commissioners, judges, and bankers and their media supporters, centred on the elitist bubbles of Brussels and other European power centres. 

On the other side, the real Europe where millions of people live, work and vote. And with the rise of national populist movements, the gap between the two Europes has been growing ever wider.

To see what this means in practice today, look at the recent presidential election in the Republic of Ireland, an EU member state where there is no powerful populist movement (yet), but there is nonetheless a growing chasm between the political class and a large part of the population.

The election was won by Catherine Connolly, the candidate supported by the left and Sinn Féin, in a reported “landslide” with a “record” 63% of the vote. She easily defeated the candidates from both old guard parties of Irish politics, the current coalition government partners Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil (whose candidate withdrew late on but still appeared on the ballot).  

Connolly has been hailed as a uniquely “anti-establishment” president. Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Irish republican movement and now the main opposition in the Republic of Ireland, declared the result “a stunning victory” for the Left.

That’s the official, headline version of the Irish presidential election. But behind those headlines lurks a rather different story. 

There was another truly “stunning” result in this presidential election. It was that an unprecedented 13% of all those who turned out to vote spoilt their ballot papers—a ten-fold increase in the number of spoilt ballots compared to the last election.

This deluge of spoilt ballots was not due to a mass outbreak of clumsy fingers in the polling booth. It was a skilful act of mass political protest, following an organised online campaign. These Irish people were effectively voting “none of the above”—or perhaps, “Feck the lot of them.” As the shocked Irish Electoral Commission conceded with typical official understatement, “it is clear that some people chose to deliberately spoil their votes.” 

The message from the people who made that deliberate choice was less understated. In the constituency of Dublin West, where at least 21% of votes cast were spoilt, the messages that angry voters chose to write on their ballot papers included “no democracy,” “EU puppets,” and “no from me,” as well as putting an “X” through all three candidates on the paper.

As reported in the Irish media, other creatives spoilt their ballot papers by writing in the names of alternative candidates who they would rather have voted for. Those names scribbled on ballot papers ranged from current Irish politicians to classic TV comedy character Father Ted, past IRA men Michael Collins and Bobby Sands, and assorted others from Dustin the Turkey and Donald Duck to Donald Trump. 

The spoiling-heavy constituency of Dublin West, we might note, is a seat currently held by Sinn Féin. The contrast between the party’s joy at the election result and the dissatisfaction of many of its constituents reveals the widening gap between Ireland’s woke republican radicals and many of their voters, on everything from immigration to trans ideology. 

Indeed, this was a striking pattern in the presidential election: the more working class the area, the higher the number of deliberately spoilt ballot papers. Sky News reported that in some places the spoilt pile reached higher than 50% of the votes cast, a scale of rejection which it admitted was “staggering.”

Perhaps the result should not really have staggered the Irish authorities, however. The signs were there beforehand. Popular discontent with the election mounted as the high bar for nominating presidential candidates meant several conservative “outsider” candidates could not even get their names on the ballot paper. 

Just over a week before polling day, an Irish Times opinion poll found Connolly held a “commanding” lead. But by far the loudest finding in that poll was that 49% of voters said they “don’t feel represented by any of the candidates”. That is a remarkable sign of the widening gap between the Irish political elites—including the allegedly anti-establishment wing—and many normal Irish people.

This suggests that even many of those who did bother to vote for one of the candidates were no more enthusiastic about the miserable choice than those who did not. 

Around the same time as the Irish election campaign ended, the capital Dublin was rocked by nights of serious unrest over the alleged sexual assault of a child by a migrant housed in a hotel. As elsewhere in Europe, the immigration crisis is the worst example of people being denied a political voice. Anybody who raises their concerns about Ireland’s disastrous open-door policy is condemned as racist by the Dublin elites. 

Denied a democratic outlet through which to express their anger, increasing numbers of Irish people are spoiling for a fight: many by spoiling their ballot papers and some, if all else fails, by taking to the streets.  

The Irish election is a stark example of a Europe-wide phenomenon. This is what the political elites across Europe now talk about as a decline in support for democracy or “democratic backsliding.” What they really mean by a crisis of democracy is that more voters are refusing to vote for establishment candidates, and many are voting for populist alternatives when offered the choice. 

As Frank Furedi, chief executive of MCC Brussels, wrote recently, 

In theory, the term democratic backsliding refers to the declining integrity of democratic values. In practice it means the estrangement of significant sections of the public from their political institutions. Once understood from this perspective it becomes evident that it is not democracy that people no longer trust but the people and the institutions that rule over society.

The populist wave is rising from Germany to the UK and is now even shaking up the historical stasis of Irish politics, albeit not yet in the form of a specific party. The response of Official Europe is to do all in its power to keep the Other Europe under control by isolating and criminalising the populist. This, as I have written here before, is a conflict between two elements at the heart of the meaning of democracy: demos, the people, and kratos, power or control.

Official Europe might not yet have lost control of the future. But the writing is on the wall as well as on the Irish ballot papers: “EU puppets,” “no democracy,” “no for me.” Europe’s silent majority is finding its voice.

Pictured: Catherin Connolly, President-Elect of the Republic of Ireland