Micheál Martin elected as Ireland’s new prime minister
He will lead the government for half of the five-year mandate, followed by outgoing PM Leo Varadkar.
DUBLIN — Micheál Martin has been named Ireland’s new prime minister nearly five months after an inconclusive election that shattered the twin pillars of Irish politics and forced them to finally govern together.
Under the terms of an unprecedented coalition pact, Ireland’s incoming government will be led for its first two and a half years by Martin, leader of the centrist Fianna Fáil.
His election Saturday by the 160-member parliament, with 93 votes in favor to 63 against, caps a remarkable comeback for the 59-year-old Martin. A decade ago, as Fianna Fáil’s newly elected leader, he saw his party’s long-dominant electoral position implode amid a humiliating banking crisis and international bailout.
In the second half of the potential five-year mandate, the government will be led by outgoing Prime Minister Leo Varadkar. His rival Fine Gael party stumbled to a third-place finish in February’s election — and seemed headed, most analysts presumed at the time, to the opposition benches.
Instead, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will become government partners for the first time, ending nearly a century of enmity borne from their roots in opposite sides of Ireland’s brutal 1922-23 civil war.
“This is as remarkable as it gets. These two parties were always at daggers drawn. They could never really come together across the divide,” said David Farrell, a politics professor at University College Dublin. “Imagine in the United States if the Republicans and the Democrats agreed to share the presidency between them. It’s that dramatic.”
Varadkar, rising to speak in support of Martin, noted that this marked the moment “that civil war politics has ended in our parliament”.
Left out of power — and instead rising to fill the vacuum as leader of the opposition in Ireland’s parliament — is the Irish nationalist party Sinn Féin.
It shot past Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to claim the most votes in February’s election. But Sinn Féin failed to take full advantage because it ran too few candidates in Ireland’s multi-seat constituencies. This left the result tightly balanced, with Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil both on 37 seats, and Fine Gael on 35.
Governing effectively requires command of at least 80 votes in Ireland’s 160-seat parliament. This meant recruiting the left-wing Greens, who won 12 seats, into what will be a three-party coalition with 84 lawmakers, sufficient to pass legislation.
The Greens’ nearly 2,000-strong grassroots members voted strongly in favor of entering the coalition on Friday night, enabling the election of Martin the following day.
The special session could not be held in Leinster House, Ireland’s parliamentary building, as it proved too cramped amid the COVID-19 crisis. Instead, lawmakers disinfected their hands in the lobby of the Dublin Convention Centre, then fanned out to the far corners of its 1,995-seat auditorium.
After the vote, Martin thanked Varadkar for leading the first stage of Ireland’s fight against the coronavirus. More than 1,700 people have died from COVID-19 in the nation of 4.9 million.
“We are meeting away from our chamber because of a historic pandemic that has struck Ireland and the world,” Martin told lawmakers. “The struggle against the virus is not over. We must be ready to tackle any new wave.”
Martin next traveled to the palatial residence of President Michael D. Higgins, Ireland’s ceremonial head of state, to receive his official seal of office. He will name his Cabinet appointments Saturday evening.