Are you content, or angry? - Village Magazine

64 February 2016

ill the 2016 election bury the idea that

the left-right divide is the key one in poli

tics? For most of the 20th century

choices facing voters in Europe were to

go for parties that said they’d tax more

and spend the fruits on public services (the left) or

those who would provide fewer public services and aim

to take less in tax (the right).

What we might consider the centre has shifted about

a bit. From the 1950s to the 1970s most, even the right,

agreed to tax and spend more. From the 1980s the

centre shifted right. All this time most parties were

identiﬁable on this left-right dimension. Voters too

could usually identify themselves on this scale. If you

were working class you tended to vote left, if you were

middle class you tended to vote right. Sometimes the

middle classes who worked in the public sector would

vote left, and sometimes the left was too left or the right

too right for their ‘natural’ group to support it fully.

Then there was a convergence on the right, and so in

the UK the Labour Party became New Labour, and

essentially became a right-wing party. In Ireland wily

Fianna Fáil’s shifting policies offer a good barometer of

which direction the ‘centre’ is going.

In the last decade, particularly since the Great Reces-

sion in 2008, left and right have become less meaningful

as an explanation of what divides the parties. While

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump appear to have little

in common, they are both appealing to voters con-

cerned about the same crisis. Those voters are

demographically very similar (white and working class).

While Trump and Sanders interpret the crisis in differ-

ent ways – one a crisis of capitalism, the other a crisis

of border control among other things – they agree in

many ways. They both rail against a corrupt politi-

cal and business elite, they both claim to represent

the ordinary worker, they agree on protectionism

in trade.

More than anything they are both angry.

They represent the frustrated in life. It is

this emotion that may be the

main denominator in

elections.

Rather than left-right, par-

ties can be distinguished by

whether they are angry at the estab-

lishment or are part of it. If we look at

the rise of UKIP we can see that the

party’s support comes at the

expense of what Labour might

have thought its core supporters

– the working class. Labour was

(and perhaps still is) seen as a part of

the metropolitan elite.

The party divide in Ireland was always hard to under-

stand. There wasn’t a strong left-right divide, but it was

Fianna Fáil’s genius that it could simultaneously portray

itself as a party of the ordinary man AND be the main

party of government. Bertie Ahern used to talk about

the government as if it were some third party, not the

organisation he was leading. In this election Fianna Fáil

still likes to portray itself as the party of the worker,

painting Fine Gael as a party of the rich. But it’s not

angry. It’s a part of the establishment.

Labour is trying to sound as if it represents the frus-

trated. Its ‘Standing up for Ireland’ slogan is designed

to pit it on the side of the ordinary against some elite,

but it is not plausible, having campaigned to deliver

Labour’s way not Frankfurt’s way in 2011. It has for

some time been a party that gets much of it support

from the middle classes. And Fine Gael is happily

appealing to those in Irish society who are content.

The other side are the frustrated: people who feel

unfulﬁlled and unable to do anything about it. It’s a

toss-up whether the parties representing them will be

on the left or right, but in Ireland they tend to be on the

left. Shane Ross and his alliance of independents posi-

tion themselves as anti-establishment rather than

obviously left or right. Renua will attract some of the

angry on the right, who perhaps see Ireland as being

ruled by a liberal elite.

Sinn Féin pitches based on the premise that there is

a cartel of bankers and politicians who rule Ireland for

their own interests, a proposition shared by the alpha-

bet soup parties on the left. This is made more plausible

by the banking crisis. Sinn Féin talks of a two-tier recov-

ery “that beneﬁts [the government] and their friends at

the top, not the majority of hard-working, fair-minded

Irish citizens”.

These are sentiments that one could hear a Le Pen, a

Trump or UKIP venting as readily as an Alexis Tsipras or

Pablo Iglesias.

The main difference distinguishing left and right

internationally, which no Irish parties have focussed

on, is immigration. It’s to Sinn Féin’s credit that it never

used immigration, especially given it is a populist

nationalist party. Many young working class men hold

views that make them ripe for anti-immigrant politics

but Sinn Féin’s nationalism (and Ireland’s history of

emigration) makes it difﬁcult to be an anti-immigrant

party.

But parties can’t be anti-establishment forever. What

happens when the parties representing the frustrated

get into power? They usually disappoint.

Eoin O’Malley is the director of the MSc. in Public

Policy at Dublin City University

Are you content, or angry?

Left-right is no longer the key divide

by Eoin O’Malley

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