Among the many headlines to emerge from last weekend’s general election in the United Kingdom, few have the symbolic importance of the story dominating the news in Northern Ireland: For the first time since the partition of Ireland in 1921, the province has elected more nationalist than unionist Members of Parliament. Read in parallel with the surge of support for the Scottish National Party and the alternative nationalism that is represented by the Conservative landslide in England and Wales, the political cultures of the once united kingdom have never seemed so diverse. Commentators have already identified this election as another episode of the Great British Break-off, encouraging the trend towards devolution that began with the institution of Scottish and Welsh parliaments in 1999, as well as the revitalization after the Good Friday Agreement of the devolved assembly in Northern Ireland. It’s a process that would presumably reach its conclusion in Scottish if not Welsh independence, and in the re-unification of Ireland.
Yet the situation may not turn out to be quite so straightforward. In Northern Ireland, the language of the peace “process” has often been understood as suggesting inevitable movement in a single direction and toward the realization of nationalist hopes. But declining shares of votes for the two major parties, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin, and the success of smaller parties, including the Alliance Party and the long dormant Social Democratic and Labour Party, suggest that politics is becoming more complicated, increasingly multipolar, and—ironically, given the context of Brexit—more evidently European. This growing electoral diversity points to both the success and the failure of the Good Friday Agreement, as well as to the emergence of a new political landscape that Northern Ireland’s governmental institutions may find difficult to reflect.
As across the rest of the United Kingdom, in this hollowing out of support for the largest nationalist and unionist parties, Northern Ireland’s general election has delivered some powerfully symbolic blows. The most significant of the DUP losses occurred in North Belfast, where the seat that was being defended by Nigel Dodds, the deputy leader of the party, was won by John Finucane of Sinn Féin. This local contest was bitterly fought and haunted by both candidates’ experiences of the Troubles. In 1989, John’s father, Pat Finucane, a human rights lawyer well known for defending IRA prisoners, was murdered by the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association (UDA), allegedly with the collusion of British intelligence, while sharing a meal in his home with his three children and his wife. In 1996, Nigel Dodds was visiting his critically ill son in a Belfast hospital when IRA members entered the ward and opened fire on his police bodyguards, with one shot hitting an incubator in the intensive care unit. In Northern Ireland, the past is always politics, and no one was surprised when both of these outrages were raised in the North Belfast contest. But Finucane made headlines when he refused to condemn the IRA’s armed assault on his rival. Like other Sinn Féin politicians who attend IRA commemorations without rejecting their illegal actions, Finucane has argued that “selective condemnation . . . cheapens our past” and acts as a “barrier to reconciliation.” In other jurisdictions, it would be unthinkable for a candidate to refuse to condemn an armed attack on his rival. But in North Belfast, there was little electoral cost to Finucane’s own act of selective condemnation.
But if Sinn Féin enjoyed a stunning victory in North Belfast, their share of the vote, like that of their principal rivals, has markedly declined. With overall turnout down by 3.6 percent, the Sinn Féin vote declined by 6.7 percent, creating space for the growth of Aontu, a recent schism from the party with strongly pro-life opinions, and the SDLP, whose share of the vote rose by 3.1 percent. The DUP vote declined by 5.4 percent, while that of the Ulster Unionist Party, their slightly more progressive rivals, increased by 1.4 percent. This is a sharp reversal for the DUP, who, in the context of the wider Conservative landslide, have moved from being kingmakers in the government elected in 2017 and led by Teresa May to becoming, at best, jesters in the court of Boris Johnson.
Only the Alliance Party can consider the election to be an unmitigated success. With their share of the vote rising by a massive 8.8 percent, the cross-community party widely known for its progressive social values built upon its remarkable achievements in the last local council and European elections to show that it has the potential to become a significant political voice. This accomplishment is all the more notable when compared with the obliteration of its sister party, the Liberal Democrats, across the rest of the United Kingdom.
But the extraordinary achievement of the Alliance Party points both to the success of the cultural transformation that has been the effect of the Good Friday Agreement, as well as to the limitations of the institutions that the Agreement created. The Agreement was premised upon the assumption that the binary nature of Northern Ireland politics would continue—that the most pressing issue would continue to be that of the border, and the possibility, or impossibility, of its being removed. This explains why the devolved assembly in Stormont has been required to operate on the basis of compulsory power-sharing—meaning that the largest unionist and nationalist parties have been required to work together to govern the province, a situation that also offers both of these parties very effective strategies to make governance impossible, as the collapse of the government almost three years ago proves.
As negotiations begin to get Stormont up and running, this compulsory power-sharing arrangement will need to be modified—or even abandoned—to take account of the province’s increasingly pluralist politics. The rise in support for a non-aligned middle ground is likely to continue. The generation of young people who have grown up in the increasingly confident peace that the Agreement created are less satisfied than are their parents by the political possibilities that have been offered by the largest nationalist and unionist parties. Much of the surge of support for the non-aligned Alliance Party can be explained by the fact that a new generation of Northern Ireland voters is now less interested in questions related to the constitution than it is in questions related to identity, gender politics, and issues like abortion rights and climate change. This explains why the most socially conservative parties, including the DUP, are having to “move with the times”—a process, to use that contested term, that heralds the end of the old religious nationalisms that once powerfully influenced both unionist and nationalist ideals and that will allow new kinds of futures to emerge.
As the electoral dust settles, the key question to emerge from the province’s general election results might not be possibility of a border poll, but why Northern Ireland, of all places, might become a bastion of liberal politics.