The Taoiseach has not yet called the election. . . and today's opinion poll may make him more hesitant. Stephen Collins, Political Editor, on how Enda Kenny now has a real chance of replacing Bertie Ahern.
The dramatic news from the latest Irish Times/TNS mrbi opinion poll is that Enda Kenny has a real chance of becoming the first Fine Gael leader to win power in a general election since 1982. If the election had been held last Monday or Tuesday, when the poll was taken, Kenny would almost certainly have emerged as the taoiseach in the next Dáil.
Fine Gael and Labour are now 4 points ahead of Fianna Fáil and the PDs. If the Greens are added into the equation then the alterative government has a commanding lead of 47 per cent to 37 per cent. Of course it is far too early for Fine Gael and Labour to take anything for granted. With Fianna Fáil now firmly on notice that its long hold on power is under serious threat, the party can be expected to mount a fierce fightback in the coming weeks.
It is clear at this stage that the Taoiseach's splurge of promises in his ardfheis speech did not halt the steady decline in the level of support for Fianna Fáil that began in January. By contrast, Enda Kenny's more restrained speech to the Fine Gael Ardfheis has helped to boost his party's standing significantly although, strangely, his own rating has remained unchanged.
Fianna Fáil and much of the media have consistently underestimated Kenny. He has now put himself in a position to repeat the astonishing performance of the European and local elections of 2004 when Fine Gael nearly caught up with Fianna Fáil in terms of council seats and actually passed out the Government party in European Parliament seats for the first time.
While the poll makes gloomy reading for the Taoiseach, the silver lining is that forewarned is forearmed and he now knows the kind of ground he has to make up during the campaign. The Fianna Fáil range in Irish Times polls over the past 12 months has been between 31 per cent and 40 per cent. If Ahern can drag his party up a few points between now and the election, he could still make it impossible for anybody to push him out of the Taoiseach's office.
The poll shows a significant improvement for the PDs since January but the party will be disappointed at the plunge in the satisfaction rating for their leader, Michael McDowell. He seems to have become the lightning conductor for anti-Government hostility and is suffering as a result. If the Fine Gael rise is sustained until election day every single one of the eight PD seats will be under pressure.
The detailed figures show that Fianna Fáil is marginally up in Dublin where its core vote is 29 per cent but it has lost significant support in the rest of the country, particularly in Leinster, where its core is 30 per cent and Munster, which is exactly the same. Connacht-Ulster is still the strongest region for the party with a core vote of 41 per cent. In terms of age groups the party's highest support is among the voters aged 64 and over. In class terms its support among ABC1 voters is holding up but its backing among C2DE voters has declined.
Fine Gael has seen a significant increase in Dublin where the party is now in clear second place to Fianna Fáil on a core vote of 19 per cent, and well ahead of the smaller parties. It has also put on significant support in the rest of Leinster and Munster with the biggest jump of all coming in Connacht-Ulster. In class terms the party's biggest gains came among the C2DE voters who have been won over from Fianna Fáil since the last poll in January.
While Fine Gael will be very pleased with the poll figures its coalition partner, Labour, has some cause for concern. The party has not only slipped back one but it is now on level terms with Sinn Féin in the adjusted vote and is actually one point behind in core vote.
In Dublin, Labour with a core vote of just 8 per cent, has slipped behind Sinn Féin which is on 10 per cent. Labour is marginally better in Leinster and about the same in Munster. While the voting pact with Fine Gael will certainly help the party's cause on election day, it cannot afford any further slippage in its own vote.
The poll will also come as a disappointment to the Greens. The party had been on a roll over the past 12 months or so but it has slipped back to its more modest level of support, losing support to Fine Gael and Sinn Féin. Its core vote in Dublin has been halved from 12 per cent to 6 per cent and some of the predicted gains for the party will not materialise unless it improves.
By contrast Sinn Féin, having come down from a high plateau over the past 18 months, is now rising steadily. With a core of 10 per cent in Dublin the party now has a bigger core vote than Labour and has pulled well ahead of the Greens. Sinn Féin is clearly getting a real boost from the agreement with Ian Paisley to establish a powersharing executive in the North.
With the executive due to be formally set up on May 8th in a blaze of publicity, Sinn Féin can look forward to building on its momentum. It can be expected that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, fresh from their endeavours in the North, will come down to campaign with their candidates across the Republic in the run-in to the election and that should provide the party with a further boost.
The resurgence of Sinn Féin will spell bad news for both Fianna Fáil and the Greens. Fianna Fáil is clearly losing some support to Sinn Féin, particularly among its C2DE, or working class, voters, and that will be difficult to recover, given the kind of publicity certain to be generated by May 8th. The Taoiseach had hoped that the culmination of the process he has been striving for over the past 10 years would give him a bounce going into the final stages of the campaign but it now appears more likely to go to Sinn Féin. The Greens are also suffering from the rise of Sinn Féin. This is particularly noticeable in Dublin. Support for the Greens has halved in the capital while Sinn Féin has almost doubled. In the local elections of 2004 the rise of Sinn Féin came at the expense of Fianna Fáil and the Greens and the same thing could happen again.
The danger for Fianna Fáil is that Sinn Féin could do to them in 2007 what the PDs did to Fine Gael in 1987 by swiping a slice of their vote that will be almost impossible to recover. With Fine Gael moving in on Fianna Fáil's other flank, a similar trend to that of the local elections would see the main Opposition party closing in on its bigger rival to a significant extent.
In the last election Fianna Fáil won 42 per cent of the vote and 81 seats as against 22 per cent for Fine Gael, which got only 31 seats. That 50-seat gap is huge but today's poll shows that Fine Gael is capable of making much more serious inroads into it than most pundits anticipated.