Timing will be everything for this government

To go to the country, or to not yet go to the country, that is the political question. For the date of the next General Election is on the mind of every politician in Ireland, whatever they might say in public.

For a sitting TD, the process of a General Election is an ever recurring job interview, an application nightmare from which they never fully awake. The job of TD is both much sought after and full of peril. There is no permanent contract of employment: every few years they must go around, cap in hand, asking for the right to go back to their old job. And every time they do, there are some bright young things out there, full of energy, knocking on doors (and banging on theirs) trying to take their job off them.

But whether they like it or not, an election is coming. The outer limit for it is Spring 2025, but fewer and fewer think it will go that long. If the government does decide to go before then, the decision on when exactly to hold the election is one of the few things they control. That is so long as they don’t lose a motion of no confidence before then, and that they can agree a date among the three parties.

Oppositions don’t determine election dates, which means they have to campaign on the ground of someone else’s choosing. Even with all the undoubted support and extra seats that Sinn Féin will gain at the next election, campaigning on a date of the government’s choosing may be hard and even tricky – that is if the government parties choose the right date, for them.

For the government parties, therefore, it is a big, lonely, decision. Elections across history are scattered with tales of how the result would have been different if held at a different time. Blame does not come dropping slow in such a situation.

In setting the date, the government will be thinking about a number of factors. The main one is the obvious one: when would they win more seats? And that debate is raging just now, with different views, opinions and party perspectives swirling back and forth.

Many in government circles think that it is hard to see how things can get any better for them between now and February 2025 – and might well get worse. That suggests they might be better to go to the country much sooner. Their argument would be that inflation is now down, even if recent price increases will stay, and some progress has been made on housing. Even if those extra houses being built will not make much impact in the real world for a few years yet, this would allow the government to campaign on the idea that ‘we have turned the corner’ and point to some big numbers of housing completions as evidence for that. It won’t be a great story, but it might be as good as it gets, and better than waiting another year and hoping some magic solution to the housing crisis appears – it won’t.

The other main argument for going earlier is that there is less chance of something going terribly wrong before then. If you leave it until Spring 2025, you have no room for manoeuvre.

Ok, so if the thinking is to go earlier, when is the best time?

For some time now, the predominant view among government politicians seemed to favour an election not long after the next budget in 2024. The argument there was that the government has seen small but real lifts in support over the last couple of years after the budget increases, as those measures had landed in pockets. So, in simple terms, you blitz them with measures in Budget 2024 and go to the country a few weeks after on a campaign platform of ‘you may not like us but we deliver the goods (and we know housing is bad but we are working on it)’. It’s not the most compelling platform, but one you could campaign on.

But there is now a problem with that. Monies taken in from Corporation Tax, the sweet lotion that has soothed all problems in Ireland these past five years, have started to go in the wrong direction. If that continues, and possibly gets worse in 2024, how can the government use the budget as the big launch of its election campaign? For if Corporation Tax was lower, and inflation was falling, it would be hard to justify continuing all that spending on additional fuel allowances and energy credits and all the rest. But if you didn’t include such payments in your budget, could you really risk going to the country just after?

So that consideration has meant that some are now beginning to suggest that the government might go before the budget, at the time of the local elections, or even before them. One political advantage here for the government parties would be to get ahead of the huge sweep of seats that Sinn Féin will certainly win in those local and indeed European elections. You can see that the government parties might not want large numbers of local poll-topping Sinn Féin candidates in a position to contest and win Dáil seats, which is an argument for holding the general election first.

But, if the government parties did that, it might look like they were doing it for the very reason they would be doing it, which would be purely political. And that would be a bad look. It is one thing to hold your last budget of this Dáil and then say – that’s us done, we might as well go now. It is another thing entirely to do it to avoid making tough choices in an upcoming budget which the people elected you to deliver – and which many will say you did to avoid an electoral misfortune.

There is – I think – another option for the government. If Corporation Tax falls, and if the economy starts to slow, it might be that this is not the worst thing from their electoral point of view. For might it not be better for the government to have an economic downturn heading into an election? When there are dark clouds on the horizon, they can make a ‘don’t change horses in midstream’ argument. And if the yield from corporation tax falls, we will start to have – for the first time in years – real debates about how we choose to spend limited resources. The government parties might see some advantages in that. So, maybe some government politicians will be suggesting that it might be prudent to hang on for as long as possible, the better to have that starker background for the election debate.

Those are the hard choices facing the government on this most difficult question. There are a lot of known factors that must be judged as they make that decision. And as all political observers look down the track, there are also the factors that can come that you didn’t expect – the riots in Dublin as a very serious example. The most important political question therefore is the one with the unpredictable answer: what will come between now and Election Day, whenever it is.