The clock is ticking. Thursday is the last chance to avoid an election in Northern Ireland through the formation of an Assembly; if this does not happen – and there is no indication it will – at “one minute past midnight”, as the northern secretary has emphasised in recent days, he will be legally obliged to call that election.
It is expected to take place quickly; campaigning will last six weeks, with the most likely polling date December 15th.
The result of the last election, in May, was a significant one. For the first time, Sinn Féin won the greatest number of seats of any party and, with it, the right to the position of first minister, though the refusal of the DUP to go back into the Assembly after the election has prevented Michelle O’Neill from taking up that role.
The seven-month impasse which has followed has served only to intensify the gulf between the DUP and the other main parties — all of whom have appealed repeatedly to be allowed to return to work — and it is difficult to see how a rerun of the election would produce either a solution or a substantially different outcome.
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“The inability of Michelle O’Neill to become first minister would be like a lightning rod for Sinn Féin to help win over wavering SDLP votes, but for the DUP their anti-protocol message would be another good rod to win back votes lost to the TUV and deny the UUP oxygen,” says David McCann, deputy editor of the Northern Ireland political website Slugger O’Toole.
“And, for people who are just fed up, you’ve got the Alliance party in the middle.”
In May, Sinn Féin took 27 seats with a 29 per cent share of first-preference votes; the DUP 25 seats with 21.3 per cent; and Alliance 17 seats with 13.5 per cent.
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The UUP and SDLP dipped slightly to take 11.2 per cent and 9.1 per cent of the first-preference vote respectively, though the UUP – which lost one seat to take it to nine – maintained its position better than the SDLP, which dropped four to eight.
The most recent polling from Belfast-based firm LucidTalk, published in August, returned broadly similar figures; asked which party they would give their first preference to if an Assembly election was to be held tomorrow, 30 per cent said Sinn Féin, 24 per cent the DUP, 16 per cent Alliance, UUP 11 and SDLP seven.
Though with the caveat that, in a proportional representation election, it is difficult to extrapolate the number of seats from first preferences only, McCann estimates that on those figures that “Sinn Fein would likely return 27-28, the DUP would stay around the same, maybe a seat more, 25-26.
Alliance would stay “roughly where they are” in terms of numbers of seats, while the UUP would “probably hold the nine that they have, on a bad day they may drop one, and the SDLP would probably fall back one to seven seats.”
Planning for an election is well under way among the parties and the electoral office, though as one Stormont source pointed out: “We’re almost always half on election footing in Northern Ireland, so things can be fairly easily put in place.”
What would be different this time would be the shortened campaign; with broadcasters already committed to coverage of the soccer World Cup there could be fewer televised debates, and Christmas post and Royal Mail strikes could see fewer election mailings and an increased focus on social media.
What is also different is the cost-of-living and energy crises, which will only intensify as the weather gets colder; Christmas is no time to be knocking on doors.
Yet the reality remains that this seems to be where Northern Ireland is heading. The clock is ticking towards that election; sooner rather than later, time will run out.
