There were the usual calls during July for unionist parties to “show leadership” over parades, bonfires and related tensions. Some of this annual criticism was unfair: unionist leadership was evident at local level in various places, even if it was not always leading people in the direction others would prefer.
The top level of unionist politics is where a strange, unprecedented rudderlessness is apparent. To paraphrase Henry Kissenger, who do you call if you want to speak to the leader of unionism?
The official answer is the leader of its largest party, Gavin Robinson of the DUP. However, the DUP’s size no longer conveys dominance. While it still holds a clear majority of unionism’s seats, it is clinging on to a bare majority of unionism’s votes – 51 per cent in the last assembly and general elections in 2022 and 2024. It managed a more respectable 58 per cent in the 2023 council elections.
There is no sense of a prospective recovery. In opinion polls, the DUP dropped below the majority threshold four years ago and after a rebound has fallen below it again, to just 41 per cent of unionist support, in the latest LucidTalk survey.
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The DUP and the UUP jockeyed to be the largest unionist party for decades, but that race appears to be long over. The UUP has been in almost uninterrupted decline for a quarter of a century and is bumping along on half the DUP’s vote share. Nobody can foresee it regaining the top spot.
All the growth within unionism this decade has been by the Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV). It does as well as the UUP in opinion polls but only half as well in elections, probably due to its appeal and resources being too thinly spread across the region.
Although unionism has had significant third parties before, this has generally been at times of high drama, such as the mid-1970s or the years around the Belfast Agreement.
Today’s three-way split has been driven by Brexit, with voters upset at the DUP’s disastrous handling of the issue. However, anger at the sea border has largely subsided to something more like exasperation. The fragmentation of unionism is now sustained not by high drama but by what looks like permanent damage to the DUP’s reputation for competence.
An exhausted party system is compounded by unusual circumstances at the top of all three main unionist parties.
Robinson was catapulted to the helm of the DUP last year by the resignation of Jeffrey Donaldson, currently awaiting trial for alleged sexual offences. Although Robinson was seen as a future leader, there is an understandable feeling among the public and some party colleagues that his elevation was rushed.
The DUP believes its leader should sit at Stormont, as that is the overwhelming focus of Northern Ireland politics.
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But Robinson is stuck at Westminster, leaving leadership at Stormont to Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly, who holds her seat thanks to co-option rather than election. This is all a complicated legacy of the DUP’s botched leadership contest in 2021. It continues to undermine the authority of everyone involved.
Neither DUP leader is doing a bad job: a poll in February ranked Little-Pengelly as Stormont’s most popular minister. That only underscores the ennui in unionist politics, suggesting voters are so fed up with the DUP it no longer matters who is in charge.
The UUP is also under unorthodox management. A selection row last year caused the resignation of leader Doug Beattie. With no obvious replacement, former leader Mike Nesbitt stepped back into the role, making clear he was doing so as a final duty before retirement. This unavoidably adds to the perception that the UUP is counting down the days until its own demise.
TUV leader Jim Allister so dominates his party it is frequently described as a one-man band. Paradoxically, he has been sidelined by his shock triumph in last year’s general election, when he unseated the DUP’s Ian Paisley.
This meant Allister had to vacate the TUV’s only assembly seat and move to Westminster, where a lone MP struggles to make an impression. The councillor co-opted to replace him at Stormont, Timothy Gaston, is an effective opposition backbencher but that hardly fills unionism’s leadership vacuum.
The wider context for unionism’s lack of direction is the loss of its overall majority in elections from 2017 and the loss of the first minister’s post in 2022. Previous DUP leaders used the office of first minister to present themselves as prime ministers of Northern Ireland, an erroneous but easy way to project leadership by default. Little more by way of vision was required.
Contrary to nationalist suspicions, the DUP has had no difficulty accepting second place at Stormont. It is having great difficulty figuring out how to lead unionism from that position.
