Even a slight upturn could expose opposition weakness Sunday, July 12, 2009 June 5 seems a long time ago now. The furore over the opposition’s victories in the local and European elections has given away to An Bord Snip Nua and a return to the bad old days of industrial strife.
No harm hen taking a step back and looking at where we stand now. The opposition will have enjoyed their day out, but know full well that they have only won the minor game. The senior hurling is about to begin.
Ironically, it is the opposition that faces more strategic questions than the government. Rumour has it that the Taoiseach has been enjoying himself since the poll drubbing.
After all, he isn’t obliged to face the electorate again until 2012 which, in political terms, is a lifetime away. To add to that, his government seems more stable too. So bad was the government’s drubbing last month that it is unlikely that any of his coalition partners or backbenchers will want to precipitate an early encounter with the electorate.
Nor does Brian Cowen need to think too hard about what to do next. The government has a single card to play. It can only hope (pray?) that the economy will improve sufficiently to make it competitive, at least, in 2012. So it has no choice but to follow its current path. It is a comforting position to be in, however much it hurts the rest of us.
The opposition victory on June 5 was won on the back of government unpopularity and ruthlessly effective campaigning by Fine Gael and Labour. The temptation will be to continue in that vein for another three years and wait for the inevitable to happen.
Yet the more considered backroom staff will know that things are more complicated than that. Opposition parties have excelled at winning local elections of late, but come up short on the big day. Granted, in the last local elections they did better than any time previously, yet the senior players will realise that the voters are asked a fundamentally different question at a general election.
To deliberately pick an overused - and perhaps unfair cliché - Taoiseach Enda Kenny was not on any ballot paper last month.
In the last few elections the question that determined the outcome was probably who the electorate trusted most on the economy. In view of the incumbent’s performance in recent times, that should be a no brainer.
It remains more likely than not that Fianna Fáil will be beaten badly for the first time in a generation.
Yet, a nagging doubt remains, in particular, about whether the manner in which the opposition attacked the government will carry a general election. The opposition parties, by definition, have spent the last decade opposing things. So much so in fact, that their role in creating the Celtic tiger economy has been eclipsed. Does the public trust the parties that seem relentlessly negative to do positive things with the economy? Not so far is the only reasonable answer.
And despite their claims to the contrary, Backroom doesn’t believe either main opposition party is viewed as having positively engaged the public with alternative visions.
Yes, documents have been produced outlining Fine Gael and Labour policies, but their main use to date has been to parry government charges that the opposition has nothing positive to say. For every statement the opposition makes about what it might do, it issues ten or 15 attacking government decisions.
The question here is whether decrying cuts, while ducking hard decisions about where your own cuts should fall, will be a positive for the opposition on general election day or a negative.
The problem for both parties’ respective backrooms is that they know this question is a closer run thing than the public - or perhaps the media - realises. They also know that media pressure on them to answer the hard questions will increase as polling day nears.
Another concern for the opposition will be their realisation that the government may require only a partial turn around in the economy to improve its political position.
Contrary to the perceived wisdom that Fianna Fáil won the last two elections against the backdrop of a booming economy, the reality is that, on both occasions, the economic climate was more unstable than it had been in preceding years. It was precisely for that reason that the electorate became more risk-averse in relation to who they trusted to run the economy.
So look forward three years from now. Let’s say that the economy is beginning to show some signs of life. Cowen will boom that his government took the tough decisions to chisel this recovery from the worst depression ever seen. He will claim that Fine Gael and Labour opposed everything the government had done right. The public might just well tell him to get stuffed, but it might not. If things are getting better for the first time in years, will the public want to change the hand on the tiller?
The opposition therefore faces two challenges. It will be risky to move away from the positioning that served them well in the local elections - why alienate anybody by being clearer about where their cuts will come? But it will also be risky to remain on the current path for fear that Cowen gets the credit for turning things around.
The opposition knows that political history is full of examples of parties grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory.
Labour in Britain in 1992 is perhaps the best recent example. Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore can sense victory now, but both know they have a long road ahead before they can claim their prize.
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