Will booming Ireland boot out TikTok PM Simon Harris?

DUBLIN — Prime Minister Simon Harris thought he had a winning formula to keep his job: an electorate primed with bonus cash for Christmas, and state coffers bursting with tax from Ireland’s legions of American multinationals.
But as voters cast their ballots Friday in a complex system of proportional representation, a gaffe-prone Harris appears to have blown his chance to stay as Taoiseach, “chief” of Ireland’s next coalition government.
The most likely beneficiary looks to be Harris’ much more experienced partner atop the outgoing center-left administration, Foreign Minister Micheál Martin, the genteel elder statesman of Irish politics and leader of the rival Fianna Fáil party.
Against expectations, the 64-year-old Martin has managed to appeal to voters more earnestly than the social media-savvy but relatively inexperienced Harris, aka the “Tik Tok Taoiseach” 26 years his junior.
Should Fianna Fáil win the most parliamentary seats as polls suggest, Martin would reclaim the Taoiseach’s chair that he previously occupied from 2020 to 2022.
For Harris and Fine Gael, the consolation prize would be a return to government for a party-record 14th straight year, but in a diminished second-banana role.
Martin would have other options — namely to strike a groundbreaking coalition with Sinn Féin, the Irish republican party that’s leading Northern Ireland but has never gained power in Dublin before.
Had this election been held a year ago, the outcome could have looked radically different — with Sinn Féin chief Mary Lou McDonald, rather than Martin, on the inside track to becoming Taoiseach, a platform her party has long sought as a way to promote unification with the north.
In the last election in 2020, a surge in anti-establishment sentiment allowed Sinn Féin, long a fringe player in Republic of Ireland politics, to win the popular vote for the first time. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, shocked and weakened, responded to Sinn Féin’s newfound strength by forging a governing majority in alliance with the small environmentalist Green Party.
While stuck on the opposition benches, McDonald long looked to be Ireland’s prime minister-in-waiting. Sinn Féin spent much of the past four years attracting sky-high support in the mid-30s, up to double the levels enjoyed by either of the main government parties.
But then the Dublin riots of November 2023 happened — an explosion of far-right rage against poorly controlled immigration and a buckling asylum system. It split Sinn Féin’s nationalist support base more than any other party.
McDonald responded by shifting Sinn Féin’s pro-immigrant policies to the right. She has campaigned on promises to create a new Immigration Management Agency to speed asylum decisions and deportations, and to slash state supports for the tens of thousands of Ukrainian war refugees in Ireland.
Sinn Féin is registering 20 percent support, the same as Fine Gael, in the latest poll published Wednesday. Fianna Fáil is barely ahead on 21 percent.
How on earth do these tightly bunched numbers make Fianna Fáil a favorite? On closer inspection, this virtual three-way tie favors Fianna Fáil and disadvantages Sinn Féin because of how Ireland’s proportional representation elections work.
Each constituency elects three to five lawmakers, not just one poll-topper. The headline popularity figures, which most polls track, cannot pinpoint who will win the final seats in each district. These are determined by redistributing votes to less popular candidates, a painstaking, multi-round process that will take days to complete.
Voters are encouraged to rate every candidate on their paper ballots in order of preference — and a typical ballot in this election will feature an average of 16 candidates, a record high.
The broad-church parties of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, which seek support from both the moderate right and left, often win seats by attracting lots of “2” and “3” votes for their candidates, hoovering up lower-level votes as less popular candidates get knocked out, round by round. Sinn Féin, by contrast, struggles to win these lower-tier “transfer” votes.
That’s been borne out by the last poll of the campaign, published Wednesday night, which unlike other polls asked voters who would get their transfers. It showed Fianna Fáil to be the big winner, Fine Gael a close second, and Sinn Féin a big loser.
“Whatever party can attract the most transfers is likely to be the party that’s going to emerge on top,” said Aidan Regan, a politics professor at University College Dublin.
“We can see very clearly that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are very strongly transferring to each other. They’re going to get a seat bonus,” Regan said, meaning that chances are higher for both parties to win two or more seats in some constituencies, particularly Fianna Fáil, which has the most candidates running.
Even if McDonald were to match or improve on her 2020 breakthrough, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been working together in Cabinet with relative calm in the years since — and both have vowed to keep the partnership running and Sinn Féin locked out.
Their antipathy to Sinn Féin has been sharpened by the imminent return to the White House of Donald Trump. He is threatening to slap tariffs on EU exports to the U.S. and to change tax rules so that American multinationals with large Irish operations end, or reduce, their reporting of profits in Ireland with its EU-low 15 percent tax rate.
Crucially, Ireland has rapidly grown to become the world’s third-largest exporter of pharmaceuticals. A staggering four-fifths of those high-value goods go to the U.S. market, not to Europe.
Harris and Martin have committed to banking much of the current record inflows of U.S. corporate taxes in new sovereign wealth funds, potentially up to €100 billion — because they fear that Trump is about to derail Ireland’s gravy train.
While all three of the big parties are making huge spending promises on housing and critical infrastructure, Sinn Féin is promising the most aggressive spending of all and to fund it by hiking taxes on the rich, saving less and borrowing more.
McDonald argues that Ireland’s problems, especially its scarcity and prohibitive expense of housing, are too severe for most of the U.S. multinationals’ tax payments to be “saved for a rainy day.”
“It’s raining really hard now for lots of people,” McDonald argued in her only face-to-face TV debate versus Martin and Harris. “I know you don’t set that level of money aside and leave people homeless.”
Fine Gael — which had hoped to claim top spot with a presidential-style campaign focused on Harris, only to see him stumble in viral face-to-face encounters — has switched in the campaign’s final hours to its most soothing  performer: Paschal Donohoe, the public expenditure minister, who also chairs the Eurogroup of nations that use the euro currency. He competes for votes with McDonald in the four-seat Dublin Central constituency.
In Fine Gael’s latest ad launched Thursday, Donohoe compared Ireland’s economic strength to a Jenga tower carefully constructed by Fine Gael — and implied a reckless Sinn Féin-led government would quickly topple it.
The greatest wild card in this election, with full results unlikely to be declared before Monday night, isn’t Sinn Féin. It’s Ireland’s growing rejection of political parties in favor of loose-cannon independents.
Independents have always been a force in Irish politics. But they have spiked, amid Sinn Féin’s splintered vote and rising racist forces, to represent an unprecedented two-fifths of the 685 names on Friday’s ballot papers.
The independents include conservative rural dynasties, Dublin’s best-known gangland kingpin, far-left critics of NATO and the EU, and a far-right array of anti-immigrant voices who admire Trump and want to “make Ireland grand again.”
Given the inability to predict who will win the final seat in many constituencies, this makes the full makeup of the next parliament impossible to call. But Harris, Martin and McDonald agree it’s all but certain to feature even more non-party ax grinders and eccentrics.
“We’re in a very fragmented political environment,” Harris said at one of his final campaign events at Trim Castle northwest of Dublin. “It looks very difficult to see how a coalition is formed that is stable.”
For Sinn Féin and Ireland’s fractious family of smaller left-wing parties, the danger is rising that a revived Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael government could tack to the right.
Martin insists that, if his Fianna Fáil does regain its traditional place as the largest party, he won’t go that route.
“By their very nature independents lack cohesion. They can be hard left, far right, and everything in between, and many candidates lack experience,” Martin wrote in the Irish edition of The Sun, a right-wing British tabloid. “Unlike a political party, they don’t form a cohesive group, they aren’t accountable, and they don’t make for stable government.”
The Greens — who gave the outgoing administration a stable majority and a leftward tilt, particularly on climate action goals — are expected to lose most of their seats this time. They fear Martin and Harris would be tempted to go fishing for parliamentary votes within the fattened independent ranks if they lack the seats to form a government without them.
“There is a very real possibility of right-wing independents or small populist parties propping up the next government,” said the Greens’ Roderic O’Gorman, who as a Cabinet minister had the unenviable task of overseeing Ireland’s overloaded system for asylum seekers. “And just as the Green Party provided a progressive direction … small populist parties could provide a very negative, very regressive direction.”