DUP's spectacular ascent not solid
Looking back at statistics since the first European election in 1979, NICHOLAS WHYTE finds that Jim Allister has achieved the second-best performance by a new party in the history of Northern Ireland's European elections.
This year's European election was a case where the losers all had reason to celebrate.
Of the two smallest parties, Alliance got its best results in a Northern Ireland-wide poll since 1998, and the Greens got their best results ever.
European elections have tended to see the centre vote squeezed to a pulp, and that did not happen this time.
For the nationalist parties, the results were nearly identical to those of 2004.
The SDLP's very modest increase of 0.3% is the first time the party's vote has increased over a full electoral cycle since 1997.
The spectre of terminal collapse has been exorcised; but is 16% a plateau or a basis for growth?
A question even more relevant to Sinn Fin; while Bairbre de Brn's topping the poll was a first for her party (though not, as some have claimed, for nationalism; the SDLP managed it in the 1998 Assembly election), her vote slipped slightly, and her running-mates in the rest of the island did very badly.
For voters in the Republic, SF are increasingly seen as a Northern Ireland party, and that may not help.
For the Ulster Unionists, Jim Nicholson's 17.1% was a small improvement on 2004, though one wonders how much if any of the 0.5% increase came from his vaunted alliance with the Conservatives, who can now claim to have an MEP in every region of the UK.
It is still a far cry from the 23.8% he scored in 1994.
The big winner among the losers, of course, was incumbent MEP Jim Allister.
His 13.7% is the best result from a dissident unionist candidate in the history of European elections (bettering Jim Kilfedder's 6.7% in 1979), and almost the best result ever from a new party in a Northern Ireland-wide election (Alliance got just slightly more in 1973).
Allister's gains came directly from the DUP, whose Diane Dodds scored only 18.2% compared to Allister's 32.0% for the party in 2004.
This was the DUP's worst province-wide result since 1998, and its worst European result ever.
A European election is a classic opportunity to cast a protest vote, and Allister's advantages of incumbency and familiarity with European issues will be less relevant in future polls; but he has established himself credibly, and while it's unlikely that the DUP's overall vote will be eroded to the same extent in other circumstances, it will certainly be dented by Allister and his allies, and Assembly seats (and possibly Westminster seats) are now at risk.
The DUP's spectacular ascent over the last ten years is less solid than it first appeared.
The rest of Europe was unexcited by all this.
Northern Ireland has elected three Eurosceptic MEPs who will sit with fringe political groups or none at all in the European Parliament, on an averagely unimpressive turnout.
The message is clear; Northern Ireland's voters are more engaged in their own local issues than the bigger European picture, and the EU will be happy to leave them to it.
• Academic Nicholas Whyte heads advisory group Independent Diplomat's Brussels office and maintains the Northern Ireland Elections Website at www.ark.ac.uk/elections
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Monday 28 May 2012
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