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DUBLIN — Ireland’s Prime Minister Simon Harris fired the starting gun Friday on a three-week election campaign that the two main government parties — aided by bloated state coffers and a giveaway budget — are widely forecast to win.
Fresh off the government jet from a European Union leaders’ meeting in Budapest, Harris stood on the steps of his central Dublin office to declare: “Ladies and gentlemen, if you give me your trust, I will give you my all.”
The 38-year-old, who took charge of his center-ground Fine Gael party only seven months ago, said he hoped to return as taoiseach — the Irish office title meaning “chief” — atop the next coalition government following the Nov. 29 vote.
His centrist government partners, the Fianna Fáil party led by Foreign Minister Micheál Martin also hopes to claim top spot and, with it, first dibs on the taoiseach’s chair.
Even before Harris made his announcement, the 64-year-old Martin was already pressing the flesh with voters at a nearby Dublin crossroads. Reflecting how well his party has prepared for a supposedly “snap” early election, Fianna Fáil issued a string of campaign videos anchored by Ireland’s longest-serving party leader.
Following the 2020 election, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael —rooted in opposite sides of Ireland’s civil war following independence from Britain a century ago — formed a coalition government for the first time alongside a much smaller party, the environmentalist Greens.
As part of their novel power-sharing deal, Martin served as taoiseach for the first two years, while the Fine Gael leader — first Leo Varadkar, then Harris following his predecessor’s shock resignation in March — went second.
They came together specially to keep a then-surging Sinn Féin out of power. And Martin emphasized at his own campaign launch Friday that he had no appetite for including the Irish republicans in the next government, either, principally because he views Sinn Féin’s economic policies as too left wing and unattractive for foreign investment.
Sinn Féin’s campaign, meanwhile, got off to an off-target start. Voters received a fresh reminder of the party’s recent wave of scandals, which have helped to drop the party into third place in polls behind Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.
In the neighboring U.K. region of Northern Ireland, where Sinn Féin leads its cross-community government, a judge on Friday sentenced a former Sinn Féin official to nine months in prison for trying to solicit sex from children. Sinn Féin had suspended that official from his party job in response to the police investigation — but colleagues then gave misleading recommendations to help him gain employment elsewhere.
In her own opening campaign video, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said her party is determined to improve on its strong 2020 showing, when it overtook Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in the popular vote for the first time but failed to run enough candidates.
“Simon Harris and Micheál Martin think this election is a foregone conclusion,” she said. “But we know it doesn’t have to be Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil forever.”
