Last year, on the centenary of Northern Ireland, Boris Johnson tweeted the following: "I want to emphasize that we will continue to defend and strengthen Northern Ireland's position within the United Kingdom." Since his every positive statement should be immediately followed by a negative, unionists could have interpreted that statement as a timely warning - that the 101st anniversary of Northern Ireland will be Orwell's Room 101 for unionists, a place where we face our worst nightmares.
After last week's election, the unionist's nightmare took the form of the warm-hearted Michelle O'Neill, Sinn Féin's vice-president and now officially the first minister of the Northern Ireland executive. But the panic in the ranks of unionists is not caused by Michelle O'Neil, but by the historical moment she embodies: for the first time, Catholic nationalists succeeded in catching up and overtaking Protestant unionists in the political arena. The main goal of her party is exit from the union. In the elections, they beat Johnson's allies from the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) by 8 percent.
In ordinary political communities, the ups and downs of parties have no existential implications. But Northern Ireland is no ordinary country. It was created with only one goal: to allow as many Protestants as possible to remain in the United Kingdom, outside of the emerging Irish state. The border was set to ensure a permanent majority for Protestants - meaning Catholics would forever remain in the minority.
But betting on the durability of anything in history often turns out to be the wrong choice. The Unionist political monolith crumbled in 1972, when Prime Minister Edward Heath suspended parliament at Stormont. Since then, it has been accepted as a principle that if Northern Ireland is to be governed at all, then it can only be achieved by power-sharing between nationalists and unionists. Such an arrangement was made official by the signing of the agreement in Belfast in 1998.
Unionists have come to terms with the fact that the time of unilateral exercise of power has irreversibly passed. They were comforted by the fact that even after granting equal rights to the nationalists, they remained the first among equals. It is a play on words. The agreement stipulates that the head of the leading party holds the title of "first minister", while the head of the largest opposition party has the title of "deputy first minister", although both positions have equal status. But language games and symbols are very important in Northern Ireland, so the qualifier "first" without qualification was enough comfort for the Unionists.
Now they have lost that too. Two important things happened in these elections. First - because symbols work just as powerfully on nationalists - announcements that Michelle O'Neil could become First Minister prompted some Catholic voters to abandon the Social Democratic Labor Party (SDLP) and turn to Sinn Féin. Second, the fallout from Brexit has proven to continue to divide and undermine unionists. This second factor produced stronger effects. The number of votes won by Sinn Féin did not increase significantly. The difference was magnified by the losses of the Democratic Unionist Party.
In the May 2016 general election, just a month before the Brexit referendum, the DUP won 29% of the vote. On Thursday, they got 21% of the vote. Support has fallen despite the party holding its old trump card - a deep-seated fear that if Catholics do not support Sinn Féin, they will be swept away and continue to campaign for a union referendum. (While Unionists campaigned on the threat of a union referendum, Sinn Féin put it on the back burner and focused on everyday life.) Northern Ireland has a long tradition of going to the polls with stuffy noses and voting for "ours", not because they the good ones but so that the others would not win.
Why did that instinct fail this time? Because the Brexit revolution continues to eat its children. The DUP, next to Ukip, was the only major party in the United Kingdom that enthusiastically and unreservedly advocated a hard Brexit. She channeled money into the campaign to leave the EU. They used the vote in Westminster to remove Theresa May and bring Boris Johnson to the position of prime minister. Also, given their sober reputation, it's odd that they were so intoxicated by the fumes of Brexit that they believed Johnson when asked when the border would move to the Irish Sea, he replied: "Only over me dead".
It makes the DUP leaders look pretty stupid after this election - which has never been difficult for Brexiteers. This development affected two very different groups of voters. There are hard-line unionists who blame the DUP for contributing to the adoption of the Protocol on Northern Ireland, albeit without malicious intent, which places this region within the single EU market, while Great Britain is increasingly moving away from it. These are the voters who supported the Voice of Traditional Unionists (TUV) in large numbers. The second group of alienated voters consists of moderate Protestants who did not even want to leave the EU. They opted for the Alliance, a party that seeks to remain in the EU and is not confessionally determined.
The election results opened up two important questions - the future of the Protocol and the possibility of the unification of the two Irelands. We got an answer to the first question in the elections. In short, when Johnson uses the Northern Ireland Protocol as an excuse to stoke conflict with the EU, claiming to represent the will of the people of Northern Ireland, he is clearly lying. Parties opposed to the Protocol - DUP, Ulster Unionists and TUV - won 40% of the vote. Those supporting him - Sinn Féin, SDLP, Alliance and two smaller parties - won 55% of the vote. If the Tories try to follow through on Dominic Raab's recent threat that his party will do "whatever it takes" to unilaterally change the Protocol, leading to a trade war with the EU, it will not be done to achieve the will of Northern Ireland voters. , but to save Boris Johnson.
As for a united Ireland, only a fool can believe that unification is close - and an even bigger fool that we are not one step closer after this election. That is not going to happen in the foreseeable future, as most Irish people are not yet even thinking about the practicalities of such an event. But Northern Ireland's identity has fundamentally changed, both with the slow demographic changes that culminated in the results of this election, and with unionist extremism before and after Brexit.
The combination of short-term and long-term historical processes produces a sense of the approach of the end. As soon as possible we need to start talking, openly, in good faith and without fences, about what the new future after Northern Ireland should look like, so that everyone can find their place in it.
(The Guardian; Peščanik.net; translation: Đ. Tomić)
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