This weekend Jeffrey Donaldson will take to the stage for the second time as leader to address DUP delegates at their annual conference.
Not since Peter Robinson stepped down in 2015 will so much attention be given to a leader’s speech. Will they or won’t they go back into government? Will Donaldson give any hints about the future direction of his party?
As delegates gather, they have some reasons to feel a bit cheerful. Under Jeffrey Donaldson the party’s fortunes have unquestionably stabilised . They held their ground in the recent local elections, taking more than 60 per cent of the combined unionist vote. They’ve once again seen off the TUV on the conservative side and the UUP on the more moderate wing of unionism.
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Within the pro-union fold, the DUP is still the main vehicle and political force by a country mile and that is why so much of the focus is on debates internally rather than the broader battle with other unionist parties.
Yet one thing that has consistently baffled me about the DUP is their inability to recognise the strength of their own position. If neither the TUV nor the UUP could take advantage of the recent difficulties for the DUP, the key question is surely when can they?
Delegates could do well to reflect on how Northern Ireland's largest unionist party has been able to time and again turn around large negative wave dynamics in a way that so many of their political rivals just seem incapable of doing.
The quandary they have gotten themselves into over the future of Stormont and the Windsor Framework is a major distraction from the real threat to their overall position – and that is the future of the union. Instead of using the conference platform to focus on this core issue, the focus will be on going back into government and when will they do it.
The DUP can claim credit for moving the debate on the Northern Ireland Protocol and pushing negotiations to get reforms and concessions from the European Union. Not many regional parties across Europe could make these boasts.
If they were in government, we could have also seen various DUP ministers talking about their solutions to the numerous public policy challenges that are facing Northern Ireland and some of the responses that they were putting forward within the executive.
At this conference all of us will be parsing speeches and comments from the various leadership figures.
You could be forgiven for thinking that we were back in 2021, with poor polls and an unstable leadership team in post. However, the damage done during those days to the party’s confidence has persisted to this day.
Over the next few weeks, the DUP leadership will need to make a big decision on not just the future of unionism but also the future of Northern Ireland. When Paisley or Robinson had to sell difficult decisions in the past, they always projected an image of strength. This led to a string of election victories and record results for the DUP in 2007, 2011 and 2016.
Confidence begets confidence in politics. If you look confident and act in that manner, it draws support toward you. That is something that Sinn Féin and Alliance has learned over recent years. Neither of those parties are spending their days worrying about their main rivals, they are just getting on with the job of pursing their own agenda.
The DUP need to recognise the strength of their own position within unionism. The voters once again reaffirmed them as the leaders of the pro-union forces in Northern Ireland. Now it’s time to lead.
Unionism is going into a new political era with Sinn Féin as the largest party and Alliance rising. That is going to pose challenges for the DUP. They’ve taken unionism down new roads before, and they will need to do it again.
They need to regain that old confidence and spend some of the political capital they have in the bank.
