Catherine Connolly has won the 2025 Irish presidential election by a landslide. Her candidacy was supported by left and social democratic parties, the Greens and Sinn Féin.
Connolly secured over 64% of the vote. Her conservative establishment opponent, Heather Humphreys (Fine Gael), received around 28–29%. A third candidate, Jim Gavin (Fianna Fáil), who had withdrawn but too late to be removed from the ballots, received 7%. A record 13% of votes were spoiled. Turnout was at 46.3%.
Militant Left (CWI Ireland) looks at the election results and what is needed to build a viable socialist and working-class opposition.
Catherine Connolly has won the presidential election by a landslide. Fine Gael’s Heather Humphreys garnered scarcely a third of the vote.
Also, in an unprecedented development in presidential elections, hundreds of thousands of spoiled votes were cast.
Three immediate conclusions can be drawn from this result. The first is that the ongoing degeneration of electoral support for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael continues. It is hard to see how this trend can be reversed.
Secondly, there is a clear hunger for an alternative to endless government by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The emergence of a ‘left’ alternative is now posed by Connolly’s victory. Can parties as different as Sinn Féin, Labour, the Social Democrats, Greens and People Before Profit-Solidarity continue to work together in a coherent manner over the coming years? That is an open question.
Thirdly, the ‘Spoil your Vote’ campaign indicates that social media-based far-right campaigns are beginning to have a resonance well beyond YouTube and X. This is a dangerous development. It is clear a significant section of the working class are permanently alienated from and antagonistic towards the political mainstream. This cannot be wished away.
A ‘left alternative’ that includes parties with records of aggressive class warfare against the working class, such as Labour and the Greens, would be a political disaster in the making. That these parties’ close involvement in creating the conditions that drive this alienation, such as the housing crisis, must be honestly reckoned with.
Given the social forces contesting the presidential election, Militant Left outlined conditional support for the Connolly campaign. The Connolly victory is a very positive development. If it represents a substantial political shift leftwards that is also hugely positive. And, of course, thousands of people, particularly young people, will have been politically activated by the Connolly campaign and her victory.
However, there are a few hard class questions posed in a presidential election. How sustainable and coherent can a ‘left alternative’ be when it includes hardened and absolutely unapologetic parties of austerity like Labour and the Greens? Sinn Féin also has a record of passing on the Westminster governments’ austerity cuts in the North, in coalition with the Democratic Unionist Party. Left and socialist organisations that took part in Connolly’s campaign might want to wish that away.
It remains to be seen how much Catherine Connolly will use the presidential role to comment on acute social and economic issues, for example on the housing crisis and on international issues, like Gaza. The presidential office is limited but could be used as a platform to speak out on behalf of the oppressed and marginalised, and to encourage working-class movements to organise and resist. However, Connolly will come under immense pressure to speak for “all the nation”, to tone down or stop taking stances, and to stick to ‘neutral’ ceremonial roles.
It is a positive that the establishment has been given a massive kicking by the electorate. We repeat our position that a mass party of the working class, based on the trade unions, community groups, wider layers of the working class and the socialist left, is an imperative. This would not be a party aiming for a ‘left government’, which some on the left believe can include pro-capitalist parties, but for building working-class power, based on a socialist programme, in our communities and workplaces.
