AS the final week of the election campaign looms, the behaviour of the main unionist party has a depressing familiarity to it.
It was back in 2017 when a snap Assembly election was held as the RHI scandal brought the political institutions down round our ears that then DUP leader Arlene Foster decided there was only one way to shore things up – and that way was to point to Sinn Féin and shout “Boo!” It was a depressingly grim campaign, a deliberate attempt to stoke the political boiler until it was ready to blow.
Every debate, every interview, every opportunity to communicate was for the DUP an opportunity to spread scary stories about republicanism rather than deliver their own vision or their own policies. There was a particular emphasis on Gerry Adams, who the DUP had doubtless focus-grouped as a lightning rod for their fears and concerns. The result is history. The Sinn Féin vote rose to within a whisker of the DUP’s, ten seats were lost and the massively symbolic unionist majority in Stormont was gone – almost certainly forever. Now the party hierarchy and its support base were genuinely scared – and not of Sinn Féin.
It was the beginning of a painful and drawn-out end for the DUP leader. And to put the tin hat on a thoroughly wretched campaign, the DUP leader’s infamous “alligator” insult to the Irish language community came to be a defining moment in a leadership that posterity will deem a total failure.
Fast forward five years and we have another DUP leader facing into a howling gale of difficulties and challenges. Jeffrey Donaldson’s party played a massive part in bringing about the Irish Sea border which every unionist party strongly opposes. Polling has consistently suggested that May 5 could prove to be a painful day for the DUP and internal party divisions continue to play out in public. And, in full knowledge of the fate suffered by the Foster DUP in 2017, Mr Donaldson has decided that the way to get voters out and voting is to repeat the strategy of 2017.
A coldly analytical view of 2017 suggests that even the relatively hardline nature of the DUP is not immune to the political reality that negative campaigning more often than not gets negative results. Mr Donaldson is not a fool; he has a long and successful political career behind him and he is not averse to making pragmatic decisions – witness his jumping ship from the UUP to the DUP in 2004. If there was a way of portraying the Protocol unionist disaster as anything other than an abject failure on the part of the DUP he would do it. The issue is said to be the number one concern of the pro-union electorate (highly debatable as the cost of living crisis deepens), yet all he wants to do is talk about Sinn Féin, who had no hand, act or part in it.
Therefore the likelihood is that it is sheer desperation that has turned him into an Arlene Foster tribute act. Perhaps he’ll shock us all on May 5. But if he fails next month he’ll have failed by looking back instead of forward.
