So Ireland had an election: Trump didn't win, but nobody else did either

In a year of global political turmoil, anti-incumbent fervor, across-the-board cynicism and the looming shadow of Donald Trump, voters in the Republic of Ireland appear to have delivered the most surprising verdict of all: No change, thanks. In all likelihood, the two mainstream centrist parties who have controlled government in Dublin for the last five years — and who, before that, had been sworn enemies for nearly a century — will get another crack at it, with or without some smaller coalition partner. 

But the story of the Irish general election on Nov. 29 is nowhere near that simple, and definitely should not be understood as evidence of widespread contentment with the status quo. In Ireland, the stories are almost never simple, and tend to involve seemingly irrelevant tangents and extended detours into the past. This election and its non-earth-shaking result reflect a pair of contradictory truths: This island nation off the northwestern edge of Europe remains a highly distinctive place and also one heavily dependent on the global economy, and on its precarious position in between Britain and the United States.

For one thing, Ireland's byzantine version of ranked-choice voting — technically known as proportional representation by single transferable vote, or PRSTV — means that numerous rounds of vote-counting are necessary over multiple days to apportion all the seats in Dáil Éireann, the Irish parliament. By early Monday morning, after 30-plus hours of counts, 162 of the 174 seats had been spread between nine different political parties and roughly two dozen independent members. But the hard part still lies ahead: Working out what combination of those parties and individual members can be stuck together into a majority coalition might take weeks, or months. There's no guarantee that a new government will be in place before Christmas.

For the Irish media, the weekend's most irresistible story concerned an accused Dublin gangster known as Gerry "The Monk" Hutch, who came startlingly close to winning a seat in Dáil Éireann, the national parliament. (Whether journalists wanted him to succeed or fail is hard to say; the Irish appetite for self-mockery is nearly matched by the fear of international humiliation.) Arguably, the Monk's terrifying and/or hilarious saga offered a local corollary to the specter that's haunting all of Europe, and nowhere more than Ireland: Trump's impending second term. This decade's Irish economic boom has been infused with exploding corporate tax revenues from a handful of U.S. companies, most notably Apple, Google, Microsoft and Pfizer. As Fintan O'Toole quipped recently in the Irish Times, his country "found the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow without even trying to catch the leprechaun."

But what happens if the magical spigot of Yank money is turned off? At the final pre-election debate last week, Ireland's party leaders spoke warily about a possible "transatlantic crash" — or, more specifically, a "Trump shock" — that could result from the incoming president's unpredictable but certainly disruptive protectionist policies. All except the youngest Irish voters can remember what happened in 2008, when the worldwide financial crisis destroyed the "Celtic Tiger" bubble of the '90s and left the country virtually bankrupt, dependent on European handouts and subject to years of punishing fiscal "austerity."

That history goes a long way toward explaining Ireland's collective reluctance to embrace change, even faced with one of the most expensive housing markets in Europe and a worsening crisis in health care access. Older Irish voters largely supported the mainstream parties of the current coalition government, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, who originated as bitterly opposed factions during the Irish Civil War of 1922-23 and have divergent political histories, but whose present-tense policies have become almost indistinguishable. Their combined seats in the Dáil will come close to an 88-seat majority, but won't quite get there.

Indeed, there's an unmistakable "back to the future" quality to this year's election results: Fianna Fáil, the long-governing and almost anti-ideological party founded by Eamon de Valera, Ireland's dominant 20th-century political figure, was virtually wiped out in the wake of the 2008 crash. Under the leadership of the avuncular, ascetic and deeply uncharismatic Micheál Martin — who now stands a good chance of leading the next government — it has been painstakingly rebuilt and is once again the largest single party, although in a transformed and fragmented political landscape. Can a dramatic tale of political comeback also be boring and disappointing? If so, that one is.

Younger Irish voters, conversely, clearly aren't happy with the government parties, but failed to unite in sufficient numbers around Sinn Féin, the left-wing opposition party formerly associated with the Irish Republican Army's guerrilla warfare campaign of the '70s and '80s. As recently as two years ago, Sinn Féin looked poised to sweep to power following a spectacular breakthrough in the 2020 election, but after a series of missteps and internal crises finished a close-run third and now finds itself a modestly diminished opposition force. (Even if it managed to align with a range of smaller left-leaning parties, which is not guaranteed, a Dáil majority is nowhere in sight.)

If the disunited Irish left was at least a borderline loser in this election, so too was Simon Harris, Ireland's youthful and energetic outgoing taoiseach (or prime minister) and the leader of Fine Gael, which is normally identified as a center-right neoliberal party but during this campaign appeared to promise almost everything to almost everyone. Mordant jokes about his politically unlucky surname aside, Harris has a vaguely Clintonite or Obama-esque manner and is given to documenting his every encounter on social media. (He has been called the "TikTok Taoiseach," in a distinctively Irish blend of admiration and mockery.)

Harris clearly went into this election hoping for a popular mandate and didn't exactly get one — but then again, nobody else did either. Declaring something that wasn't quite victory in an admirably honest post-election press conference, he said, "I think the people of Ireland have now spoken. We now have to work out exactly what they have said."