Presidential Election 2025

I can say with a high degree of confidence that a large portion of those who spoiled their votes will vote for parties to keep the left out of the next government.

Everyone said the same about the referendums in Family and Care last year. Remind me again how much of a difference it made to the status quo? Nothing. We still elected the same two parties to lead the current government in a General Election only 9 months later and they even got closer to a majority by themselves than they had in those referendums.

The next General Election is 4 years away. I personally think it's 'naive' to think that all of those voters will stay the course again when that comes around. A portion of them will vote for fringe right-wing parties, but that's it.

Percentage of seats for FFG after 2020: 45.6%. 8 seats from a majority

Percentage of seats for FFG after 2024: 49.4%. 3 seats from a majority

They got a hell of a lot closer to a majority in 2024 than they had after 2020. So the OP is absolutely bang on the money.

Also, they hold every single senior ministry, which they did not have after 2020.

I also find it very funny that someone is trying to argue that the number of spoiled votes is relevent but the number of actual valid votes for Catherine Connolly (the highest by any candidate in the history of the State) is irrelevent.

They did not win in 2020. They did not win in 2024. It is basic maths. They could not form a government on their own after either GE.

If the point you're making is that they didn't get a majority, well done.

However, the actual point is that their proportion of the vote only got bigger, the proportion of seats they won got bigger, and they now hold every senior ministry in the government.

9 months out from overwhelming referendum defeats, they had a bigger mandate than they went into those elections with.

What part of that are you struggling to understand?

or it could be FFG voters who were unimpressed with the prospect of voting for HH and spoiled their votes rather than give approval for the last minute candidate after Mairead MCGuinness dropped out for health reasons.

In some respects, that Spoil The Vote campaign launch looked like the start of a new party. If it got off the ground, it could take support from FFG as well as floating voters. Funding is a major problem. Awareness is a larger one. Social Media does provide a better way of getting its policies known than the legacy media.

People who talk about FF or FG lurching to the right just fundamentally do not understand Irish politics, and are viewing the whole thing through an American or a British lens of FPTP voting and two-party politics. They also try to peg Ireland to the exact same left-right political spectrum of other countries, where that's also something that's foundationally different about Ireland.

That's not how Ireland works, thankfully, and those people would do well to read up on the composition of Irish governments, specifically the fact that we haven't had a single-party majority government since 1981.

Major Irish political parties don't need to lurch anywhere, coalition governments mean they can adapt more deliberately and carefully.

Deliberately missing the point.if in normal elections the spoilt vote is 0.5 to 0.8% then you can ignore it.but when it skyrockets to around 13% then it’s a major problem

Good luck to our new president.i don’t care for her Marxist ideology

This result is overwhelming rejection of FFG candidate and policies. Nevermind spoiled votes, a lot of people who voted for Catherine did so only because they wanted to stick it to the FFG. Besides the choice was to vote for bad or worse and more than half the people didn't bother to go anyway.

The point is that FFG did not get enough seats to form a government in 2020 or 2024. The referenda showed that the electorate doesn't like liars. The government was defeated in the referenda. It was also defeated in 2024 with the Greens losing all but one seat. The FFG/Lowry government was defeated in this presidential election.

FFG won a higher share of the vote and a higher proportion of the seats in 2024 than they had after 2020

Bang on about majorities all you want, but the referendums made not one jot of a difference to FFG, and I feel like you are deliberately ignoring this point because you feel you have to.

They hold every senior office in government now. How on Earth can you ignore that while you make your pedantic point? The referendums defeat had no impact on them whatsoever.