Connolly’s stunning victory humbles old parties and energises the left, yet it’s no revolution: the presidency remains symbolic
Catherine Connolly’s landslide victory in Ireland’s presidential election is a stunning political feat that humiliates the establishment but does not signify a national swerve to the left.
There was nothing inevitable about her triumph, let alone its scale. In July, when she declared her candidacy, she was a one-woman act: an independent leftwing member of parliament from Galway who was unfamiliar to most voters.
Yet the 68-year-old won backing from a hodgepodge of small opposition parties – the Social Democrats, People Before Profit, Labour – and then a big one, Sinn Féin – which decided to not run its own candidate – in a rare show of unity from the usually fractious left.
Even then Connolly seemed an outside bet. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, the two ruling centre-right parties that have dominated Irish politics for a century, each fielded their own candidate. Under electoral rules, voters select candidates in order of preference, so if one candidate was eliminated, transfers were expected to help the other establishment figure across the line.
