Back in 2011, as the political effects of the Great Recession were just beginning to appear, Peter Mair wrote about an emerging divide in European party systems between ‘parties which claim to represent, but don’t deliver, and those which deliver, but are no longer seen to represent.’ For Mair, ‘the growing gap between responsiveness and responsibility – or between what citizens might like governments to do and what governments are obliged to do – and the declining capacity of parties to bridge or manage that gap, lies at the heart of the disaffection and malaise that now suffuses democracy.’ He discussed the state of Irish politics in the wake of the 2008 crash as a paradigmatic illustration of this trend.
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This counterproductive aversion to risk-taking reflects Sinn Féin’s general modus operandi since the last election, which has several European precedents from the past decade or so. If we look at Syriza after 2012, the SNP after 2014–15, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership after 2017 and now Sinn Féin after 2020, we can see a recurring pattern: a radical political force makes an unexpected breakthrough and then adopts a more cautious and conventional approach, seeking to present itself as a government-in-waiting (or in the case of Scotland, a state-in-waiting). Of course, this is exactly what the standard playbook would have told them to do in this situation. But the very same playbook would also have declared their initial advances to be inconceivable.