This week’s intransigent gestures on Brexit from Northern Ireland’s largest party suggest it is facing electoral defeat in May
The Democratic Unionist party pulled the plug on post-Brexit Irish Sea border checks this week and then resigned its joint leadership of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing executive. These were dramatic gestures. They are a reminder of the chronic instability that has continued to dog Northern Ireland governance, in spite of the Good Friday agreement. They are also a reminder of the particularly destabilising effects of Brexit for Ireland as a whole.
But they are, above all, a sign of DUP political weakness, not strength. They are a foolish gamble that the DUP can get its way in a Brexit argument to which compromise is, in the long run, the only solution. In the short term, however, the DUP’s action has been provoked by electoral fear. An assembly election is due in Northern Ireland in three months’ time. The DUP’s positions as both the dominant unionist party and as the largest party in the assembly are under threat amid the anxieties triggered by Brexit. The party has been losing support to more moderate and more fundamentalist rivals alike.
