Fear and loathing are accelerating the demise of DUP

Last week the party announced that it would only field 30 candidates in the upcoming general elections. as Belfast Telegraph Politics editor Suzanne Breen noted that’s 21 percent fewer candidates than in 2017, when she fielded 38. In the 2016 election – Arlene Foster’s first triumphant campaign as DUP leader – the party fielded 44 candidates.

Comparisons to the pre-2017 general election are imperfect, when the number of MLAs was reduced from 108 to 90. Still, Jim Allister’s uncompromising Traditional Unionist Voice – a modern incarnation of guttural Paisleyism – now has more candidates than before.

It’s a sign of right-wing Unionist confidence, just as the DUP’s decisions reveal an uncertainty uncharacteristic of a party prone to boasting.

The DUP’s announcement was posted on its website last Monday but, unusually, was not emailed to newsrooms. The statement’s opening lines framed this as a competition with Sinn Féin to become top dog; the old warning that if unionists don’t vote for DUP, they’ll get a first minister from Sinn Féin. This too is evidence of fear; it is the party’s final appeal when others have failed.

Based on the decline in DUP candidates, the party is most vulnerable in its core areas – North Antrim, home of its founder, and Lagan Valley, home of its leader. In these areas, the party only has half as many candidates as in 2016.

Eight of the constituencies where the party is fielding fewer candidates had DUP MPs at the time of the last general election, but only five of them still have them.

However, numbers don’t tell the whole story. Both the experience and the profile of some DUP candidates have decreased significantly. The party does not attract high-profile figures from outside politics.

In Fermanagh-South Tyrone, the DUP’s 2017 candidates were party leader Arlene Foster and leader Lord Morrow. In this election, her candidates are Deborah Erskine, a former councilwoman who was elected to the assembly last year to replace Foster, and Councilman Paul Bell, who left the party over Foster’s ouster and warned it would cost her “thousands of votes would lose. before rejoining her after the fall of her successor, Edwin Poots.

It now seems clear that the peak DUP has been exceeded. If it doesn’t, and the party later returns to higher levels than 2016, it will almost certainly come at the expense of the union movement as the wagons become ever more closely encircled.

The DUP is increasingly incoherent – bound not by ideological beliefs but by the lack of alternative targets for most of its warring members. It was not always like this.

Although Ian Paisley conflated piety with politics, the party was never simply an extension of its leader’s other enterprise, the Free Presbyterian Church. Still, the dominance of church members in their ranks and their willingness to proclaim religious messages from political platforms gave many DUP members a sense of sacred mission. For some of them, blocking abortion was just as important as protecting the union.

This old fundamentalist vision is now being relegated to the margins of the DUP. If Northern Ireland is secularised, it makes electoral sense. But the old positions were never openly rejected.

This has led to the absurd situation of the DUP embracing its first openly gay councilor – while simultaneously embracing a veteran DUP councilor who publicly called for prayer against the gay councilor’s election.

This is untenable and will ultimately be decided in favor of the party’s liberal wing. But when that happens, those party members who cling to the mistaken belief that their party still prides itself on spearheading the Save Ulster From Sodomy campaign in the 1970s will be forced to face the reality that they are politically are homeless.

It will also destroy the DUP’s narrative, which makes it unique – a family with “Christian values,” as Foster said, despite the party’s myriad scandals and outright slanders.

The DUP’s two decades at the helm of unionism have been glorious for its senior officials, rewarding for those who have benefited financially from their association with the party, and disastrous for the ideology the party espouses.

What has it achieved? The union still exists, but it can hardly be given that credit if two decades ago there was never any serious prospect of an end. The Union is more vulnerable than it was in 2001 and the Irish Sea border is pushing Northern Ireland away from the UK – a result of a Brexit the DUP called for and was able to shape in an unprecedented direction.

It was a stronger counterweight to Sinn Féin in the early years of the DUP’s dominance, and after Stormont’s restoration in 2007, it managed to keep decentralization going and outmaneuver the Republicans for nearly a decade. But the price of such relative stability was a shambolicly incompetent, arrogant and unaccountable system that collapsed over the RHI scandal.

The modern DUP cannot complain about lack of time. Winston Churchill was Prime Minister for nine years, Margaret Thatcher for 11, New Labor for 13 – the DUP was Prime Minister for 19 years.

Too many in the party gave in to what journalist Andrew Marr calls the “dark temptations of power.” There is a deep irony in this; the party best versed in biblical warnings against pride, hypocrisy, strife and betrayal became drunk on power and sinned – both politically and, as many DUP members see it, religiously – with abandon. Now she must hope that voters will be lenient and that the damage she has done to the union is not irreparable.