Ruth Dudley Edwards: I’m a politics junkie, but after these elections I might go into rehab
I’ve been a politics junkie for much of my life but I’ve never been closer to quitting than now.
I could blame the round-the-clock news programmes and social media that encourage binge watching of political soap operas, but mostly it’s my own fault.
The day begins with listening to Times Radio, which self-identifies as the “Election Station”, and feeds my addiction throughout the day.
Apart from China (where the Communist Party allows no opposition whatsoever) and the usual suspects, what a year this is for elections all around the world! In at least 97 countries from A (Algeria) to V (Venezuela), around two billion people — a quarter of the world’s population — are eligible to vote.
Even dictatorships like Russia that rig elections and murder political opponents are being faced with spoiled votes and boycotts.
There are regular excitements, like, for instance, the ANC (African National Congress) in South Africa and the mighty Indian BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) being forced to swap from one-party rule for coalition .
We now have the hoo-ha about Donald Trump’s felonies, and Joe Biden’s excruciating performance in the presidential debate: the world is mesmerised by a forthcoming election in the world’s greatest democracy where there is no sane choice available.
Germany is rattled since last month’s European elections saw a huge surge in support for the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) especially in the former East Germany. In France, the victory of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally in the first round of the parliamentary elections has seen the centre desperately trying to cobble together an uneasy deal between centrist and far-left to defeat it in the second round on July 7.
And in the EU there is plenty of trouble looming in clashes between the autocratic, centralising Brussels bureaucracy and the desire of such nation states as Hungary and Denmark to hang on to the sovereignty that Ireland seems to be thoughtlessly ceding. Without any real debate, it has signed up to the EU Migration Pact, which will control its immigration policy.
The wind of change is blowing almost everywhere, often in different directions. In our small corner of the world, the Republic of Ireland led the way in 2020 when after a century of bitter enmity the old civil war enemies Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael — terrified of the danger to democracy posed by a Sinn Féin government — went into voluntary coalition.
In the United Kingdom, I fear a landslide Labour victory under a leader who has been a worshipper at the altar of the woke human rights industry, which, as we know from bitter experience in Northern Ireland, involves tryrannical rule by mission-creeping lawyers, bureaucrats and Sinn Féin fellow-travellers.
In Northern Ireland, the DUP strive to recover from the fall of Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, while I wring my hands at the politically suicidal inability of unionists (and moderate nationalists) to combine against the terrorist apologists of Sinn Fein. If they won’t get it together in Fermanagh and South Tyrone to defeat Pat Cullen — the recently retired head of the Royal College of Nursing who won’t even condemn the murder of nurses at the 1987 Enniskillen Remembrance Day memorial service — what hope is there?
Similarly, why can’t they get the votes out in East Belfast to save the decent, rational DUP leader Gavin Robinson from the self-righteous, arrogant, “progressive” Naomi Long?
Despite having been justice minister, she was slow to accept the implications of a judgment accepted by every other executive party, overturning a bad law which would have criminalised those who named after death a known paedophile such as Jimmy Savile.
If the UK elections go as badly as I fear, I may go into rehab.