Ireland is in the final days of a presidential election campaign which has raised the real prospect of the country’s first ever left-wing president, Catherine Connolly.
From an electoral view, the campaign has shown that there is a mature understanding of priorities in the Irish left, and I don’t say this lightly. In previous times, we wouldn’t have been sure if an alignment of this sort would be possible and if a focus on a common goal would have been there. But here, in a campaign that’s not like others in the sense that it’s so different from a purely parliamentary one, it has been shown that there is enough of a capacity to act together and to be aligned for the time necessary to achieve the goal.
At the same time, from the perspective of politics in general, Connolly’ campaign has normalized a certain discourse that might have been perceived as somewhat taboo by the bourgeois media. So, the fact that they’re chasing her to ask her opinions about foreign policy, and that they’re shocked that she doesn’t consider the US an ally or that she’s going concerned about militarization of Europe, is a very welcome and very important shift.
Irish politics does have a tradition of such voices in the public space, but recent elections may have reduced the numbers of such voices in elected positions. And now Connolly is having a primetime conversation about the military industrial complex – after the first presidential debate, one of the Irish newspapers ran an explainer on what the military industrial complex is. So, the discourse that we’re witnessing here is very important.
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Left unity and independent political action raise real prospect of Ireland’s first left-wing president
https://pvonline.ca/2025/10/23/left-unity-and-independent-political-action-raise-real-prospect-of-irelands-first-left-wing-president/cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/3728