For all those wondering if the centre ground in Irish politics can hold in the face of the populist onslaught from Sinn Féin, and others, this week’s general election in Denmark had an important message.
Traditional parties of government can weather the storm if they remain calm and deliver sensible policies that protect the majority of people in times of crisis.
The Danish election had all the ingredients that made Borgen the best political drama ever screened on television.
In the real life political drama of 2022 a woman prime minister was forced into a general election because of a serious error of judgment and a new party led by a male former prime minister grabbed all the headlines.
The crisis arose because Mette Frederiksen, the leader of the Social Democrats, who was widely regarded as handling the Covid crisis well, made one bad mistake – ordering the killing of the country’s entire mink population on the mistaken advice that the animals could pass the virus on to humans.
Frederiksen made a snap decision to slaughter around 17 million mink in 2020, destroying the livelihood of Denmark’s 3,000 mink farmers and breeders, on the basis that they could be Covid transmitters and destroying an important export business for the country in the process.
The issue came back on to the political agenda during the summer when a commission appointed by parliament concluded that the government lacked legal justification for the cull and that it had made “grossly misleading” statements when ordering the sector to be shut down.
A leftist party which had kept Frederiksen’s minority government in power withdrew its support as a result of the commission report forcing her to call an election which took place on Tuesday.
Polls during the campaign indicated that she was on the way out of office with a new party, the Moderates, led by former prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, coming from nowhere to hold the balance of power between the traditional left and right blocs.
In the event Frederiksen and her party defied media predictions and actually gained votes and seats, leaving her in pole position to form a new government but giving her new coalition options.
She is no longer dependent on hard left support to build a coalition but has the option of doing a deal with the Moderates and possibly even the mainstream conservative parties to form a government of the centre.
After a nail-biting count, which initially showed that the outgoing government would fall far short of securing a majority, Frederiksen and her supporting parties won the 90 seats needed for a majority in the 179-seat parliament. The Social Democrats, who have been the dominant political force in Denmark since the 1920s, achieved their best election result in more than 20 years.
The lesson for Ireland’s traditional parties of government, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael is clear. They need to ignore all the prophets of doom predicting a certain Sinn Féin victory at the next election and focus instead on showing that they know how to run the country.
Last week’s Irish Times poll indicated that there is still a substantial constituency for their brand of centrist politics.
Delivering the prestigious Romanes lecture at Oxford University on Wednesday night, Taoiseach Micheál Martin identified the most corrosive factor within western democracies as the way populist politicians have been allowed to frame big issues.
“Populism is not a coherent ideology. It lacks core theoretical texts or a consistent set of policy prescriptions. It is based on promoting division, group loyalty and fear of the other. Most of all, it is flexible and adaptable – it finds no virtue in consistency or accuracy,” he said.
Martin pointed to the virulence of anti-EU sentiment as a good example of this trend.
“It is the extremes of the right and the left that are always the loudest in attacking the EU as an elite conspiracy. The left claim it is an anti-worker conspiracy while the right claim that it is an anti-capitalism conspiracy. The overlap in much of their language and tactics is striking.”
This trend is as true in Ireland as in any of the other EU member states even if the long-standing opponents of the EU now claim they are simply critical rather than fundamentally opposed to the European project.
If the centre parties here hold their nerve and continue to provide sound government public attention might even begin to focus on the kind of alternative being offered by populists.
Last week leading Sinn Féin figure Eoin Ó Broin was in the limelight for suggesting the chief economist at the Department of Finance should be sacked because he had written an internal note on housing the Sinn Féin spokesman on the issue didn’t agree with.
This was a worrying development, reminiscent of populist movements elsewhere who demonise “experts” for pouring cold water on simplistic solutions to complicated problems. It is long past time that populists here were subjected to even a fraction of the scrutiny that is routinely applied to the parties of government.