抄録
The outcome of the 2020 Irish general election suggested the end of nearly 100 years of civil war politics when Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – hitherto dominant and always opposed – formed a three-way coalition government with the Green Party. The 2020 election saw the significant rise of Sinn Féin, which won the highest number of votes and became the second largest party in terms of seats. In light of this, this paper attempts to explore what lies behind Sinn Féin’s breakthrough in Irish party politics, employing ‘challenger party theory’ developed by De Vries and Hobolt which offers theoretical aids to understand the political battle between a dominant and challenger party. This paper finds that the Sinn Féin inroads first appeared in their victories in the 2014 Local Election and European Parliament Election. Beginning then, Sinn Féin policies focused on ‘everyday life’ issues, e.g. water charges and housing, that impacted more directly on voters. By contrast, the dominant government party (Fine Gael) focused more on macro-level performance, e.g., exit of EU/IMF Financial Programme, No.1 GDP growth in EU, and successes in ensuring no hard border in Northern Ireland due to Brexit. Despite seat losses in the 2016 general election, Fine Gael continued
to misjudge voter preferences - only 1% of voters said that Brexit was important - allowing Sinn Féin to garner votes not only from young people but from broader age cohorts too. This paper concludes that while Sinn Féin’s rise happened due to it being the challenger party, it is unclear whether they can succeed as a catch-all party, given that it will force them to review their electoral strategies.
