In the general election held in the Republic of Ireland on February 8, the left-wing nationalist Sinn Fein received more first-preference votes than the country’s two mainstream parties, Fian Geil and Fionna Fail. Even though Fianna Fail narrowly won the largest number of seats in parliament, it was Sinn Fein that received the main media attention because this overthrew the country’s centre-right status quo. The party is historically associated with the provisional IRA, an armed movement that, from 1969 to 1994, operated to extract Northern Ireland from British rule The IRA insurgency during the 25 years of conflict took 1,700 lives. Faced with Sinn Fein’s surge in the polls, both Fine Gael and Fianna Fail highlighted the party’s link with IRA during their campaigns. Still, these tactics did not prevent Sinn Fein from rising as the new political star of the country.
Ireland is not the first country where a party associated with secessionism and violence has thrived in elections. Five years ago in June 2015, the pro-Kurdish People's Democracy Party (HDP) in Turkey also reached a record-high election result, surpassing, for the first time, the 10 per cent national threshold and winning 80 of 550 seats in parliament. During election rallies, the president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had accused the party of being a front for the armed separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Compared to Northern Ireland, Turkey’s experience with the Kurdish armed conflict has been even more lengthy and bloody, having taken over 40,000 lives in 40 years. Yet, in the election of June 2015, Erdogan’s tactic to associate the HDP with the PKK did not help his own Justice and Development Party (AKP), which lost its parliamentary majority due to the electoral rise of the HDP.
Erdogan’s tactic to associate the HDP with the PKK did not help his own Justice and Development Party (AKP), which lost its parliamentary majority due to the electoral rise of the HDP.
Illegitimate actors no more
For long decades, both parties had been delegitimized and viewed as threats to the constitutional order in the two countries. The violence, which was both a cause and a result of state policies on the minority populations they represented, outlawed these parties as illegitimate actors in the eyes of the electorate. Later, however, three things in sequence transformed these parties into charmed contestants in the electoral struggle.
