General Election 2024 – Winners, Losers, and Lessons

With all the votes counted and seats filled, it is a good time to reflect on the 2024 campaign.

The clear party winners were Fianna Fáil - back with more, and the most, seats by a margin.? Two Ministerial casualties will hurt but restoring the party’s position as the leading political party more than compensates.?Fianna Fáil’s candidate strategy and transfer appeal were an improvement on 2020. Its campaign was safe if not spectacular and it happily left Fine Gael to be the lightning rod for the “too long in Government” anti-incumbency sentiment.?

Apart from carrying the “14 years in power-why haven’t you fixed X or Y” burden, Fine Gael managed to shoot off a couple of toes.? If you base your campaign so much on the leader and his New Energy, you cannot complain if individual blips get what seems like disproportionate negative attention.?But despite an unhappy campaign, Fine Gael have a lot to be happy about.?

Four seats lost where TDs stepped down were a blow but ten gains, bringing in a lot of fresh blood more than compensated.?Ultimately the party can celebrate being back in its fourth successive Government.?By 2029, it will have been in power for eighteen consecutive years -nothing to be sniffed at.

Sinn Féin can take some comfort from the result.?It has shown an ability to improve its candidate strategy and its vote management is probably now the best among the big three.? However, a fall of 5.5 points from the 2020 General Election suggests that the high polls numbers of the summer of 2022 were a political mirage.?Yes, there was a recovery from the Locals, but the final result suggests that they recovered most of their base but not the middle-class floaters who turned to Labour and the Soc Dems.

The latter two parties will be pleased that their vote and seat numbers increased but it is past time that they put personality differences behind them and looked to build a cohesive centre left block.? With three larger parties on or around 20%, Labour, the Soc Dems and the Greens now have an opportunity to build a fourth block of up to 20% which would make Government formation a genuine contest.

The Greens have left a strong legacy and an admirable commitment to climate action.? But it is time that they recognised that in developing their advocacy on social justice they now have huge swathes of overlap with Labour and the Soc Dems. A Green/Labour/Soc Dem voting pact, aligned with agreed candidate selection could prove to be a real winner in the next General Election.?Parties of the left are fond of urging FF and FG to coalesce because so little divides them.?Perhaps they would be better looking after their own glass house first.

One aspect of the campaign that needs reflection is RTE’s approach to leaders’ debates.? The ten-way debate was both unwieldy and, with its focus on the big three, unfair to the other party leaders.?The big three debate was not a debate.? Instead of throwing in a few balls and letting them at it, the programme turned out to be a series of gotcha questions for all leaders.? RTE can and should do better.

One other lesson we should all learn from the results is that opinion polling on voting intentions 2 or 3 years out from an election is pretty pointless. It makes a good read and political anoraks devour polls, but their usefulness has been seriously questioned by the outcome last week.

Finally the Electoral Commission or the House of the Oireachtas Commission need to develop a comprehensive training course for candidates, especially those likely to succeed.?We have seen some pretty horrendous “heists” onto shoulders last week but few to match this here.

Help is needed for the heisters on how to lift and hold and the heistee on how to look half dignified - punch the air or wave (one hand or two, or clap).?We have four and a half years to sort this out.

Gerry Naughton, Public Affairs Director at Drury