With parties of the radical right coming first or second in a series of Western EU states in last month’s European elections, Ireland might seem an exception. It’s true that no politician in the mould of Giorgia Meloni, Geert Wilders or Marine Le Pen is banging at the doors of power. Ten years after UKIP became the largest group representing Britain in the European Parliament, Nigel Farage’s former press officer Hermann Kelly sought his own path to Europe from the other side of the Irish Sea. Still flying high in British politics, Farage speaks with considerable affection of Kelly – ‘dear old Hermann a big strong strapping Paddy’ – but his erstwhile protégé managed to get only 2 per cent of the vote in the Midlands North-West constituency.
Yet Ireland’s local and European elections, held simultaneously on 7 June, saw far-right groups win a foothold in the political mainstream for the first time. A new party of the right, Independent Ireland (II), took one of the country’s fourteen seats in the European Parliament with 6.2 per cent of the albania phone data vote. Four minor groups that stand further to the right had a combined vote share of just under 5 per cent, although none of their candidates came anywhere near winning a seat. In the local elections, the far right barely registered overall, but three candidates running on anti-immigration platforms were elected to Dublin City Council (out of 63 seats in total).
Independent Ireland was created less than a year ago by three TDs who won seats as independents in the last general election, in February 2020. The name reflects the new formation’s carefully ambiguous profile. At one level, it’s a pitch to the sizeable portion of the electorate that frequently votes for independent candidates (a non-party party, so to speak); at another, it implies that Ireland’s independence is under threat from actors whose identity remains conveniently vague. II’s leader, Michael Collins, attended a meeting of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in Kilkenny last year, and went to Italy last December for the Atreju conference, organised by Meloni’s party, where he spoke on a panel with far-right leaders from Cyprus and the Balkans.