Ireland goes to the polls on February 8 following the collapse of a minority government which has ruled since 2016. Prior to the recession, Irish elections were predictable contests. Whatever the result, the government would be led by one of two center-right parties in what was historically a two-way contest. The Left has never won an election in Ireland or even come close.

The center-right’s hegemony goes back to the Irish Civil War. While in most other European countries industrialization created the basis for left-right electoral competition, it was the civil war that created the modern divide in Ireland. The winners of that conflict became Fine Gael, the losers became Fianna Fáil. These two parties have monopolized government formation ever since.

Ironically, it was the losing side in the civil war that became the dominant party in the twentieth century. Fianna Fáil offered a mixture of social conservatism, economic pragmatism, and industrial corporatism. Many analysts defined the party as a proxy for social democracy in Ireland. They won majorities among the working class, the middle strata, and the farming class. Such was their ability to maintain this alliance that ever since the first-entered government in 1932, they ruled nearly 80 percent of the period until 2007. Irish politics was dominated and defined by Fianna Fáil in a way that defied conventional ideological metrics.