After a short and lackluster general election campaign, Irish voters went to the polls on Nov. 29 to elect a new government. With 174 seats in parliament up for grabs, the leading center-right parties from the outgoing coalition government, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, won 48 and 38 seats respectively, while their junior coalition partner, the Green Party, lost all but one of its 12 seats. The main left-wing opposition party, Sinn Fein, narrowly beat Fine Geal into second place with 39 seats, the highest number of deputies the party has ever returned to the Oireachtas, or Irish legislature.
Three weeks earlier the coalition government had dissolved parliament with less than three months left of its five-year term. On the back of a 14 billion euro giveaway budget and faced with a disparate left-wing opposition, the Fine Gael-Fianna Fail alliance hoped to buck the anti-incumbent trend sweeping Europe. That gamble paid off, as they are now set to return to power.
They were helped by some of the unique features of Irish politics. To begin with, Ireland is the one of the few European Union member states that uses the single transferable vote, or STV, form of proportional representation in all of its elections. Often referred to as “ranked choice voting” in the U.S., voters rank candidates in order of preference in multi-seat constituencies. The candidate with the lowest number of first-choice votes is eliminated and their votes distributed according to the voters’ second-choice selections, a process repeated over multiple counts until all seats are filled. Under this system, the personality and local engagement of individual candidates takes on much greater importance, resulting in a more pronounced degree of clientelism and a higher proportion of independent MPs unaligned with any party.