The victory of the nationalist party, favorable to the reunification of Ireland, would constitute a historical tilting.
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Northern Ireland could experience a historic turning point. For the first time in the history of this United Kingdom nation, dominated since its creation, in 1921, by Protestants (mainly Unionist, faithful to the link with London), a nationalist party favorable to the reunification of Ireland, Sinn Fein is well placed to lead the parliamentary elections on May 5. If this political and societal tilting is confirmed, twenty-four years after the end of the unrest, this civil war which opposed nationalist Catholics to the Protestants Unionist for thirty years, it risks provoking a political crisis and will relaunch the debate, very sensitive in Dublin as in London, at the end of the partition of Ireland.
Saturday, May 7, twenty-four hours after the start of a long and complex counting, the Sinn Fein (a party present on the whole of the island, in the Republic of Ireland as in Northern Ireland), came to the top of the first choices expressed by voters (18 deputies acquired against 12 in the Unionist Party, DUP). In all, 90 deputies must be appointed to sit in the Stormont assembly, the North Irish parliament, with substantial powers (health, justice, education), even if the sovereign subjects remain in the Westminster field.
If this advantage is confirmed, Michelle O’Neill, the vice-president of Sinn Fein, will be entitled to claim the post of Prime Minister of the North Irish Executive. Jeffrey Donaldson, the leader of the DUP, the Unionist Party, hitherto dominating in Northern Ireland, should be satisfied with the post of Deputy Prime Minister, under a system of sharing powers inherited from the Friday Friday peace treaty ( 1998) obliging Unionists and nationalists to govern together.
The two posts enjoy almost identical prerogatives, but, symbolically, they do not have the same scope. And symbols as well as identities still have a lot in Northern Ireland. Humiliated, criticized for his support for Brexit and the government of Boris Johnson, the DUP threatens not to participate in the North Irish executive. No question, according to him, of “returning to Stormont” as long as the North Irish protocol remains in place. This crucial part of the Brexit Treaty, negotiated by London and Brussels, has established a customs border since 2021 in the Irish Sea, between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, which the Unionists consider as an affront to their identity British.
“If the protocol is not modified and the commercial barriers removed, we do not return to Stormont,” threatened Edwin Poots, ex-chief of the DUP, just re-elected North Irish deputy to Belfast South, Friday 6 may. The party hopes for an intensification of negotiations on the protocol between London and Brussels, but the latter have been patinating for months. Brussels refuses, in any case, to renounce this arrangement aimed at preserving the European internal market. “The DUP takes the North Irish executive hostage,” said Michelle O’Neill, a few days before the ballot.
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