In seismic election shift in Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein is winning

Northern Ireland was carved out of the Irish Republic a century ago to protect the rights of its predominantly Protestant, pro-British population. But Friday, the largest Irish national party, Sinn Fein, was on the cusp of being declared the territory’s largest party, a political watershed in a land long torn sectarian violence.
With much of the vote in legislative elections counted Friday evening, Sinn Fein was on track to win the most seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly, a dinction that will allow it to name the first miner in the government.
The significance of the election lies less in political privileges than hard-fought hory: A national party at the helm in Northern Ireland will kindle new hopes for Irish unity, but it could also sow a return to unrest between Catholics and Protestants in a territory where delicate power-sharing arrangements have kept the peace for more than two decades.
It is a remarkable coming-of-age for a party that many still associate with paramilitary violence.
“For nationals who have lived in Northern Ireland for decades, to see Sinn Fein as the largest party is an emotional moment,” said Diarmaid Ferriter, professor of modern Irish hory at University College Dublin. “The very idea of leading a government in Northern Ireland would once have been repugnant to it.”
Across the United Kingdom, local election results Friday were handing some setbacks to Prime Miner Boris Johnson, in what was widely seen as a test of the damage to him and his Conservative Party from a swirling scandal over lockdown-breaking parties at Downing Street.
But it was in Northern Ireland where the results were carrying the most sweeping potential for change.
Sinn Fein’s victory has deeply unsettled the unions, who have declined to say they will take part in a government with a Sinn Fein first miner. That could lead to a breakdown of Northern Ireland’s parliament, known as Stormont, and paralysis in the government. Some even fear a flare-up of the violence between Catholics and Protestants that the peace accord ended after the 30-year guerrilla war known as the Troubles.
Sinn Fein made its electoral gains with a campaign that emphasized kitchen-table issues like the rising cost of living and health care, and that played down its totemic commitment to uniting the North and South of Ireland — a vestige of its ties to the Irish Republican Army.
The shift will push the Democratic Union Party, which favors Northern Ireland’s present status as a part of the United Kingdom, into second place for the first time since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which created the system under which unions and nationals share power.
Among the other likely big winners in the election was the Alliance, a centr party that aligns with neither the nationals nor the unions. Analysts said the party’s candidates had drawn votes away from “soft unions,” suggesting that the sectarian conflicts of the past are less resonant, particularly with younger voters, than everyday concerns like housing, jobs and health care.
“A plurality of voters in Northern Ireland say they are not national or union,” said Katy Hayward, a professor of politics at Queen’s University in Belfast. “Now there seems to be momentum behind that view.”
For all the symbolism, the victory was as much about disarray in the union movement as the rise of the nationals. Unions have been divided and demoralized since Brexit, largely because the Democratic Union Party signed off on the British government’s negotiation of a hybrid trade status for Northern Ireland, known as the protocol.
The arrangement, which imposes border checks on goods flowing from mainland Britain to Northern Ireland, has triggered a backlash among union voters, many of whom complain that it has driven a wedge between them and the rest of the United Kingdom. The British government, eager to mollify the unions, is weighing legislation that would throw out parts of the trade protocol. But it has yet to act.
Such a move would ratchet up tensions with the European Union and possibly even spill into a trade war. It would also antagonize the United States, which has warned Britain not to take steps that could jeopardize the Good Friday Agreement — a pact negotiated under the auspices of the Clinton adminration.
President Joe Biden, who frequently talks about his Irish roots and staunchly opposed Brexit, has raised Northern Ireland’s status in meetings with Johnson. He has also asked his staff to reiterate his concerns about the issue to British officials.
While unions point to the trade protocol as the source of their problems, analysts said that Brexit, which a majority of voters in Northern Ireland opposed, was at the root of the divisions within the movement.
“It’s Brexit that’s casting a shadow over Northern Ireland,” said Bob McDonagh, a former Irish ambassador to Britain. “It’s not the protocol, which is actually an attempt to solve the problems caused Brexit.”