In the immediate aftermath of the recent Irish general election, journalists and commentators around the world invoked that slippery term ‘populism’ to make sense of an electoral outcome that few had anticipated.
According to an article in The Atlantic that was widely panned on Twitter, Sinn Féin’s success in winning the highest percentage of first preference votes under Ireland’s proportional representational system confirmed that the “global populist wave” has now arrived in a country where it has heretofore been “conspicuously absent”. The Irish case was framed as the latest storyline in a now “familiar tale”, where “mainstream parties falter, only for a new, populist force to fill the vacuum”.
International media reports were not blind to the particulars of the Irish case. Sinn Féin’s success in advancing a left-wing manifesto that resonated with heightened public disquiet about the abject condition of Ireland’s housing and health infrastructure was widely recognized. And, though it should have been emphasized more, some noted the absence of the kind of nativist and racist rhetoric that has been the hallmark of other political formations characterized as populist.
