Northern Ireland is about to test the dictum that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insanity. Political deadlock triggered a forthcoming assembly election that is expected broadly to replicate the result of an election last May and produce the same deadlock. That it will take place in winter underlines the sense of Groundhog Day, except it is an entire region of 1.9 million people reliving the same experience. Despite the sense of futility, posters will adorn lamp-posts, canvassers will knock on doors, party leaders will debate on TV and voters will troop to polling stations. And then, bar a dramatic surprise, a familiar political landscape will emerge in which the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) will continue to boycott power sharing – in protest against the post-Brexit Irish Sea border – and paralyse the Stormont assembly and executive.
“The people spoke in May. Why make the people speak again?” said Jon Tonge, a politics professor at the University of Liverpool and an authority on Northern Ireland elections. “This is just going to harden things. That’s why it’s a catastrophically stupid thing to do. It will just confirm the impasse.” In a different polity, seven months of political dysfunction amid crumbling public services and a cost of living crisis might trigger a voter revolt, punishing the parties deemed culpable and rebooting the whole system. Not in Northern Ireland. Anger and fatigue at recurring bouts of stalemate are not expected to hurt the biggest parties. In May Sinn Féin won 29% of the vote and 27 seats in the 90-seat Stormont chamber, a landmark result that made it the biggest party and its vice-president, Michelle O’Neill, the putative first minister. The DUP won 21% of the vote and 25 seats and the centrist Alliance won 13% of the vote and 17 seats. The Ulster Unionist party (UUP) trailed with 11% of the vote and nine seats, followed by the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP) with 9% and eight seats. Fringe parties made up the rest. Nicholas Whyte, a psephologist with the consultancy Apco Worldwide, said recent polls suggested continued strong support for Sinn Féin, the DUP and Alliance, but that even if they increase their vote percentage, the vote transfer pattern may curb any seat gains. “Even if the votes shift, the seats may not shift by quite as much. So the election is likely to have a similar result as the last election.” All parties will cite the need to tackle energy bills and other bread-and-butter issues but traditional orange versus green dynamics will still prevail. “Nationalists will want to reassert the notion of a nationalist first minister. That augurs well for Sinn Féin,” said Tonge. Last May the DUP ran on a promise of boycotting power sharing unless the protocol was changed and won a mandate from unionists who consider the Irish Sea border a threat to Northern Ireland’s position in the UK. The party kept its word and ran down the clock to this week’s deadline to form an executive. It is just the latest crisis. Stormont has not functioned for four of the past six years, raising doubts about the viability of institutions established by the 1998 Good Friday agreement. Rather than waste an estimated £6.5m on an election, the UK government should pass emergency legislation to postpone the vote and overhaul power-sharing rules so that no party could veto an executive, said Tonge. “Instead of timing out the institutions they should time out the veto so the baton of governance passes to a party that is willing to participate in Northern Ireland’s political structures.”