“We’re in a very fragmented political environment,” Harris said at one of his final campaign events at Trim Castle northwest of Dublin. “It looks very difficult to see how a coalition is formed that is stable.”
For Sinn Féin and Ireland’s fractious family of smaller left-wing parties, the danger is rising that a revived Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael government could tack to the right.
Martin insists that, if his Fianna Fáil does regain its traditional place as the largest party, he won’t go that route.
“We’re in a very fragmented political environment,” Harris said at one of his final campaign events at Trim Castle northwest of Dublin. | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
“By their very nature independents lack cohesion. They can be hard left, far right, and everything in between, and many candidates lack experience,” Martin wrote in the Irish edition of The Sun, a right-wing British tabloid. “Unlike a political party, they don’t form a cohesive group, they aren’t accountable, and they don’t make for stable government.”
The Greens — who gave the outgoing administration a stable majority and a leftward tilt, particularly on climate action goals — are expected to lose most of their seats this time. They fear Martin and Harris would be tempted to go fishing for parliamentary votes within the fattened independent ranks if they lack the seats to form a government without them.
“There is a very real possibility of right-wing independents or small populist parties propping up the next government,” said the Greens’ Roderic O’Gorman, who as a Cabinet minister had the unenviable task of overseeing Ireland’s overloaded system for asylum seekers. “And just as the Green Party provided a progressive direction … small populist parties could provide a very negative, very regressive direction.”