Opinion

Newton Emerson: Sinn Féin and the DUP have nowhere else to go but back to Stormont

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

The Alliance Party's success in last week's council elections shows that the DUP and Sinn Féin must move to the centre if they are to grow their own votes. Picture by Matt Mackey/Press Eye
The Alliance Party's success in last week's council elections shows that the DUP and Sinn Féin must move to the centre if they are to grow their own votes. Picture by Matt Mackey/Press Eye The Alliance Party's success in last week's council elections shows that the DUP and Sinn Féin must move to the centre if they are to grow their own votes. Picture by Matt Mackey/Press Eye

THE remarkable success of Alliance in last week's council elections should not distract from the even more remarkable failure of the DUP and Sinn Féin.

Compared to the last council election in 2014, considered a poor performance for both parties, the DUP has added 18,697 votes and Sinn Fein 4,875 votes.

That is all they have to show for the past two-and-a-half years of duelling on Stormont's lawn.

They fought a council campaign based on exploiting the political paralysis and their neck-and-neck race to be the largest party, complete with threats and promises of a border poll. It did not work.

Direct comparisons between different types of elections are usually misleading.

However, the ratchet effect of the 2017 assembly and Westminster contests, when the DUP and Sinn Féin levered up each other's votes, could have been expected to carry some momentum over into last week.

Both parties clearly thought it would do so, given how many extra candidates they ran.

Full council election results

Yet no momentum materialised. Turnout was effectively unchanged from 2014 and the growth in the Sinn Féin total, at under 1,000 votes a year, did not even keep pace with the growth of the electorate, with the party slipping back one percentage point to 23 per cent.

The DUP appeared to do slightly better but only by cannibalising fringe unionist parties, who now face extinction.

That will be bad news for unionism in the longer term. Under proportional representation, the more parties in your bloc the better.

Stranded in the middle of the unionist bloc, like a beached whale, are the 95,000 people who voted UUP last week, down from 102,000 in 2014, which was considered a good performance.

It is fair to suspect not a single one of those people considers themselves a fringe unionist and almost none are clinging to the UUP because they see it as the more staunch of the main two unionist parties.

If the DUP wants to start seriously cannibalising their votes it needs to tack to the centre, regardless of the mixed messages coming from the UUP.

The DUP and Sinn Féin enter Stormont talks this week knowing they have tapped out the politics of deadlock, confrontation and high constitutional drama.

That has motivated just about everyone it is going to motivate and it will not be enough to produce further sea-changes in their favour.

Too much can be read into the gains by Alliance and other centrist parties - they are crediting their growth mainly to new voters rather than converts.

But it is not necessary to over-emphasise their success. The wall the big two have run into is reason enough for them to take a different direction. The significance of the rising centre is that it points the way.

It would be a disservice to Alliance and others to describe their growth as a protest vote. That carries too many negative connotations.

However, it was clearly a strong signal of frustration. To the extent this signal came from new voters it carries extra weight, as winning new voters is the Holy Grail of electioneering.

Proportional representation adds another significant factor. Alliance's share of the vote has reached 11.5 per cent, which might not be enormous in absolute terms and still leaves it the fifth-largest party.

But in key battleground districts across the east of Northern Ireland it topped the poll.

This is a complete transformation from previous council and Stormont elections, when Alliance depended on transfers to secure a final seat or two.

Now it is winning the first seat or two, or even three, with everyone else looking to it for transfers.

How do you secure transfers from the centre? Unionist parties have a daunting list of actions to take: abandoning religious and social conservatism, truly embracing compromise and cooperation, taking some ownership of the Brexit disaster and, of course, not printing leaflets linking Alliance to the IRA.

In some ways the challenge to Sinn Féin is harder. It already thinks it is socially liberal to a fault, yet it is still not transfer-friendly.

Its continued staunch lauding of the IRA appears to negate all centrist appeal and that will be more difficult for it to abandon than for unionists to finesse their position on same-sex marriage, for example.

Beyond these details, the overall message to Sinn Féin and the DUP could not be plainer: get back to Stormont.

They may not manage it this month but for the foreseeable future they have nowhere else to go.

newton@irishnews.com

Full council election results