The Italian communist leader and political theorist Antonio Gramsci’s best-known quotation is probably the entry in his ‘Prison Notebooks’ in November 1930.
“The crisis exists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Although Gramsci was most likely referring to an ultra-left swing in the Italian Communist Party and the growth of support for fascism after the Wall Street crash, his observation has been applied in all kinds of different circumstances.
Indeed it could also be applied to the political circumstances in the Republic in recent years.
All the polls show the majority of people want change and have done for several years. That was evident at the last election in 2020 with the huge swing to Sinn Féin, which won the popular vote.
Fine Gael had been the dominant party in the governing coalition for a decade and Fianna Fáil had been discredited after the financial crash in 2008. One or other party has run the south since independence. Many people wanted a new beginning.
However, following Benjamin Franklin’s injunction “We must all hang together or we will all hang separately”, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael did what had previously been unthinkable and came together in a coalition, with the tiny Green party (who’d benefitted from Sinn Féin transfers) as a mudguard.
If the polls are correct it looks as though the same will happen again. Sinn Féin seem to have arrested the decline in their support during this year so that they’re on equal terms with Fianna Fáil at around 19-20%, and only four points behind Fine Gael.
That may be, but Mary Lou McDonald has no path to government because both Micheál Martin and Simon Harris have declared they will not talk to Sinn Féin to form a coalition.
If you were unfortunate enough to sit through the leaders' debate on RTÉ on Monday you will have seen how Harris and Martin ganged up on McDonald. One journalist said they acted like “a tag team”.
McDonald successfully held her own against the onslaught, repeating her mantra of change needed after a century of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
The separate campaigns Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have engaged in over the past fortnight are false and dishonest. They only pretend they’re in a contest with each other.
After all, neither can attack the other’s policies since they both voted for all the measures of the same government of which they were members.
Not only do they have the same policies, the only difference being how much they promise to spend if re-elected, but they are both determined to continue in government together to prevent the change a majority of people want.
It’s an extraordinarily peculiar situation where there are two indistinguishable parties yet they won’t merge.
There is one slight difference, however. Simon Harris wants to continue as taoiseach.
He’s more popular than Martin. He’s new, only having been in office since April, and obviously wants to be returned after next week’s election far enough ahead of Fianna Fáil in seats to claim the position.
Ideally he would also like to win enough seats to be able to avoid agreeing to a rotating taoiseach, though it’s doubtful whether Martin would accept that.
Harris’s big fear, as some polls indicate, is that people who want change opt not to vote for the big party promoting radical change, Sinn Féin, but instead turn to one of the dozens of single issue Independents campaigning on immigration or climate change or farming.
In fact Independents are polling about the same as the three big parties, around 20%. If that were to happen, neither Harris nor Martin could demand to be taoiseach for five years.
Equally unpredictable is how votes for left-wing parties will spread. In 2020 several had TDs elected because Sinn Féin didn’t field enough candidates, which won’t happen this time.
Nevertheless, Labour, Social Democrats, and various iterations of Dublin Trotskyites are likely to be elected. Along with undisciplined Independents, it looks likely to be a volatile Dáil because cobbling a coalition to reach the required majority of 88 will take months. Holding it together will be like herding cats.
Looks like making sure “the new cannot be born” makes for unstable, capricious, unpredictable politics and weak government: Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms”.