Ireland’s two largest center-right parties appear on track to hold on to power after Friday’s election, but will likely need at least one junior partner to achieve a majority, raising questions about the stability of the next government.
The parties could face protracted negotiations or an unstable coalition before the inauguration of US President-elect Donald Trump, whose pledge to cut corporate taxes and impose tariffs poses a major threat to the Irish economy.
Fine Gael and Fianna Fail polled 21% and 19.5% respectively in an exit poll, slightly behind left-wing opposition party Sinn Fein on 21.1%.
With both centre-right parties ruling out a deal with Sinn Fein, the main question was how close to the 88 seats needed for a majority the pair could secure – and whether
“If they are both on 20%, that will leave them close to 80 seats, I suspect, and then it will be a question of who goes with them,” said Dublin City University politics professor Gary Murphy.
To have a stable government, they hope that small center-left parties and potentially willing partners, the Labor Party or the Social Democrats, will win 11 or 12 seats, Murphy said. A four-party coalition could be much more fragile.
The coalition’s current junior party, the Greens, secured support of just 4%, down from 7% in the last election. This could see its seat numbers drop from 12 to three, said senior party member Ciaran Cuffe.
The formal counting of votes began at 6am on Saturday (30) and is expected to last until Sunday at the earliest in many constituencies under Ireland’s proportional representation system, known as the single transferable vote.
This system is likely to give larger parties a higher proportion of seats than their percentage of the vote, but an approximate seat count may not emerge until Sunday.
