Voters in Northern Ireland are to cast ballots in a local election after a low-key campaign that became a proxy referendum on the region’s political stalemate.
Thursday’s election will fill 462 seats in all of Northern Ireland’s 11 councils and shape battle lines between and within parties over the fate of the Stormont assembly and executive, which have been paralysed for a year.
The Democratic Unionist party (DUP) is blocking power-sharing to protest post-Brexit trading arrangements. It has claimed credit for the Windsor Framework, which tweaked the original Northern Ireland protocol, but wants further concessions before restoring the Good Friday agreement institutions.
Polls suggest Sinn Féin will reap nationalist resentment at the boycott and emerge with the biggest share of the vote and council seats, consolidating its position as Northern Ireland’s dominant party.
However, even if the DUP slips to second place in local government it will be able to claim a victory and mandate of sorts if the losses are minor and it fends off a challenge from a small, hardline rival, the Traditional Unionist Voice.
In February all councils raised their rates and some reduced local services. The UK government’s flat budget allocation for the region – a de facto cut when inflation is factored in – compounded gloom.
In the campaign concern over the economy and the management of cemeteries, leisure centres and bin collections played second fiddle to the traditional nationalist-versus-unionist divide. Commentators said a sense of fatigue pointed to a low turnout.
Sinn Féin made Michelle O’Neill, its deputy leader and putative first minister, the face of its campaign. She is not running for a council seat but her exclusion from the symbolic top job at Stormont is a galvanising issue for nationalists.
The party is on track for 29.8% of first preference votes, a 6% jump from the 2019 council election, according to an Irish News-University of Liverpool-Institute of Irish Studies survey. That would consolidate its performance in last year’s assembly election when it overtook the DUP as the dominant party.
However, Sinn Féin’s ascent comes at the expense of its nationalist rival the Social Democratic and Labour party and does not reflect increased support for a united Ireland, said Peter Shirlow, director of the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies. “It’s just churning the nationalist vote.”
The DUP is forecast to drop slightly from its 2019 result to 24%. Its leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, on Wednesday asked unionists for a mandate “to finish the job” of safeguarding the union with Britain. “We have pledged to voters that we will seek to re-establish the Northern Ireland assembly on a fair and sustainable basis by finishing the job of protecting NI’s place in the UK and its internal market,” he said.
The DUP needs to minimise defections to the Traditional Unionist Voice, which envisages no return to Stormont unless the protocol is completely ditched, said Shirlow. “There is a strategy here. They want to present to the electorate that they are the party that gets things done.” The DUP plan is to wring further concessions on post-Brexit arrangements, plus a financial package, and then revive Stormont, perhaps in the autumn, said Shirlow.
A surge in support for the centrist Alliance, which shuns nationalist and unionist labels, is forecast to continue, possibly edging it past the SDLP and Ulster Unionist party to become the third biggest party in local government.
