For the first time on Friday, the political descendants of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which for 30 years, from 1968 to 1998, waged a bloody war on power in London, won an election.
Sinn Féin, long the “political wing of the IRA”, came first in the deputies of the Northern Ireland Assembly. His victory is historic: separatists, supporters of the withdrawal of the province from the United Kingdom and its attachment to the Republic of Ireland, will appoint a prime minister – in this case, a prime minister. And this, in a political and geographical area, the north-east of the island of Ireland, which has always been dominated by English “unionists”, supporters of maintaining the colonial link with the United Kingdom.
These unionists have just lost their relative majority, and the face of Northern Irish political power is upset. This new face is smiling, young and feminine: Sinn Féin’s candidate for the post of head of government is called Michelle O’Neill, a blonde in her forties who has taken over from the dark and sometimes tragic characters that are the historical leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.
These old heirs of the war had negotiated, in the 1990s, the difficult, uncertain – and frankly unfinished – transition to peaceful coexistence between Irish Catholics and English Protestants… A “cold peace” that any visitor to Belfast can see in 2022.
However, the symbolic step has now been taken: 29% for Sinn Féin, 21% for the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP, main formation of supporters of the United Kingdom of Protestant faith). But reservations are necessary and immediately limit the “revolutionary” character of this vote.
First, it is indeed a relative majority, in a proportional system where half a dozen parties will be represented at the next Belfast assembly. If we add the votes of all openly pro-Union and pro-London formations, we arrive at around 40-41%. And if we stick to Sinn Féin the votes (rather pro-republican, pro-Irish unification) of the social democrats, the greens and a small nationalist formation, we also arrive at 40-41%.
This leaves a bloc of one in five people in Northern Ireland that is no longer defined by the opposition between Protestants and Catholics, or between “pro-London” and “pro-Dublin”.
A party like the Alliance (14% of the vote) expresses a marked agnosticism on the question of identity and religion, while nearly 20% of Northern Irish people now declare themselves “without religion”, and that religious identities are questionable in an increasingly secularized world.
(Which absolutely does not mean that the Irish national question no longer arises!)
Moreover, this election takes place at a time when the political institutions of Northern Ireland (resulting from the Good Friday agreement of 1998, which officially ended the “Time of Troubles”) are blocked.
This impasse returns to London, which governs by decree, the power de facto in Northern Ireland — power that said agreement was supposed to delegate! So Friday’s election is more a life-size poll… than the choice of a government, with an applicable program.
Reason for this blockage: the Good Friday agreement imposed compulsory cooperation between the two camps, in the form of an imposed coalition between Protestants and Catholics – the “big decision” on the substance of the question always being postponed indefinitely .
The head of government came from the party that came first (it was always the DUP) and the vice-leader from the party that came second (Sinn Féin). Today, this order is reversed: an important symbolic break, produced by a demographic change unfavorable to Protestants and by the slow progression of the idea of Irish unity.
But today, the DUP no longer wants to play the game with Sinn Féin, and not only because it lost and the unionist camp is now divided into three formations. Because the DUP is also furious… against Boris Johnson and the power of London!
Brexit went through it — Brexit that Northern Ireland voted 55% against. The DUP as a party had supported Brexit, but it now feels betrayed, abandoned by the government of Boris Johnson. And this, because of the famous protocol according to which Ulster remains governed by the trade rules of the European Union – to avoid the imposition of a land border between the two Ireland, a great fear which brings back the specter of the “Troubles” .
So, Sinn Féin’s victory: a step closer to Irish reunification and the break-up of the United Kingdom? It’s entirely possible, and that’s what Michelle O’Neill believes, by 2030.
The combined effects of Brexit (which frustrates pro-Europeans and tends to fragment the United Kingdom), secularization (which makes the Irish question a political and not a religious question) and demography (there are now fewer Protestants than Catholics) inexorably bring the question of Irish unity to the fore.
In this sense, even if Sinn Féin’s progress in these May 2022 elections proves to be relative, and is rather the result of the division of its opponents, its first place is a symbolic shock which reshuffles the cards. More bad news for Boris Johnson.
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]