Mike Nesbitt elected new Ulster Unionist leader by 80% margin

Saturday evening former Ulster Television anchor Mike Nesbitt was elected the new Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader over farmer John McCallister by a margin of 407 votes out of a total of 665: 536 to 129. That computes to roughly 80 percent to 20 percent, a larger margin than most had predicted. Nesbitt had neutralized his opponent's call for the party to go into opposition by calling for a committee to investigate the issue to be chaired by McCallister.  But the real thing that Nesbitt had going for himself was name recognition--probably the most crucial factor in politics. As a former news anchor/presenter he was well known to party members where McCallister was not, particularly east of the Bann River. Nesbitt's first challenge will be to stop the rot by deciding on a clear course of action for the party and an identity that the party has lacked since the rival Democratic Unionists stole the UUP's policies in 2006.

In the two-week leadership campaign he emphasized repair to the party rather than alliances with other political parties whether the Conservatives or the Democratic Unionists.  He will have to soon implement this before a skeptical media decides that the honeymoon period is over and starts sniping at him.   This means that he will have to avoid the type of "own goal" errors that his predecessor, Tom Elliott, made. As a media-savvy person Nesbitt should not find this too difficult.

Of some 2,000 party members eligible to vote in the election, which was held at the Ramada Hotel in Belfast during the party's annual general meeting, only 665--or less than a third--ended up attending the meeting and voting. This is a significant drop since the last election in 2010 when Elliott was elected with 939 votes cast. It may mean that the party's base is starting to abandon the party--either for other parties or simply joining the  ranks of the apathetic middle class in the province. This will have to be reversed if the party is to have a future.

There are two obstacles to the opposition option. First, there is no allowance in the Good Friday Agreement for a political opposition and hence no funding. Second, the UUP's natural partner in the opposition, the nationalist SDLP, is opposed to the opposition option. Before opposition can be seriously contemplated answers to both these problems must be found.

Ulster Unionist Race is a Two-Man Contest

I was wrong--or at least premature--when I said in my last post that the Ulster Unionist Party leadership contest would be a three-man race involving Danny Kennedy, Mike Nesbitt, and John McCallister. Kennedy announced on Friday that he would not be filing nomination papers for the position and would instead be backing Mike Nesbitt. Nominations for the race closed yesterday with only McCallister and Nesbitt having filed. The former UTV anchor/presenter has emerged as the establishment choice for the leadership with backing by three out of four UUP lairds (UUP members elevated to the House of Lords) including former liberal faction leader Ken Maginnis, now Lord Maginnis, and former Good Friday Agreement skeptic John Taylor, now Lord Kilclooney. Because former party leader David Trimble is now a Conservative peer, he is not among the four lairds. Nesbitt has also been endorsed by the Belfast Telegraph, the paper of the unionist establishment. 

Kennedy's main aim was to protect his ministerial position in the Executive, which was threatened by McCallister's call for the UUP to form the opposition. Kennedy is not a personality who relishes confrontation and so was happy to make an implicit deal with Nesbitt, after having been approached by a number of party figures, under which he will keep his ministry and Nesbitt will get the leadership. Had Kennedy remained in the race he would have risked splitting the non-liberal vote within the party and throwing the election to McCallister and thereby losing his ministerial position in the long run.

This is reminiscent of the 1825 "corrupt bargain" in which Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams made an implicit but unwritten bargain. Both despised Andrew Jackson--whose father had emigrated from Ulster shortly before Jackson was born, the third rival in a four-man presidential contest at a point when the United States effectively had a single political party. Because no single candidate had a majority of electoral votes the election went to the House of Representatives to decide the election with each state's House delegation casting a single vote. Clay, who had come in fourth behind Jackson and Adams and a Georgia Treasury secretary was eliminated from consideration. So Clay threw his considerable support in the House behind Adams who won the presidency even though he had received fewer popular and electoral votes than Jackson. Adams rewarded Clay by appointing him as his secretary of state, which in the early nineteenth century was considered to be the stepping stone to the presidency. Jackson made a major issue of this "corrupt bargain" in the 1828 presidential election that laid the foundation for America's two-party system.  Jackson won and became one of the great presidents of American history while Adams entered into a second career in the House during which he opposed slavery from 1835 until his death in early 1848. 

As I indicated in my previous post, liberals do not generally win UUP leadership elections. There have only been two UUP leaders who could be classified as liberals: Ken Andrews from 1940 to 1943 and Terence O'Neill from 1963 to 1969. Both were before the trauma of The Troubles and the competition with the DUP. In January 1974 when UUP leader Brian Faulkner adopted an uncharacteristic liberal persona by supporting power sharing with the nationalist SDLP party he was forced out of the leadership and forced to resign from the party.

The leadership election will be on March 31 in an as yet unnamed Belfast hotel.

The UUP Leadership Contest

It is official--there are three candidates to fill Tom Elliott's shoes as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in Northern Ireland. They are: Deputy Party Leader John McCallister; Rural Development Minister and MLA David Kennedy; and MLA Mike Nesbitt, a former UTV anchor/presenter.  McCallister leads the liberal wing of the party and is being supported by his friend Basil McCrea who lost to Elliott in the previous leadership election in September 2010. The election will be at the end of the month.

Traditionally liberal candidates have not done well in UUP leadership elections. The last closest thing to a liberal was Terence O'Neill who resigned as prime minister in April 1969 at the start of The Troubles. Typically the right wing reactionaries also do not prevail in the UUP, although Lord Brookeborough who was prime minister for twenty years from 1943 to 1963 would fit that category. Bill Craig, the leader of the Vanguard paramilitary movement and faction within the UUP failed to win the election to succeed O'Neill in 1969 and the election to succeed the successor, Robin Chichester--O'Neill's cousin, in 1971.

Normally it is the centrists who can employ the correct language to appeal to the reactionaries who win. In 1995 David Trimble was the candidate of the right--he had been photographed participating in a triumphant jig after an Orange Order had been forced down the Garvaghy Road in Portadown during the Drumcree I crisis. In a five-way race that included John Taylor, the former interior minister in the last Stormont government before direct rule, and Ken Maginnis, the security spokesman of the party as the leader of the liberals, Trimble won.  Both Trimble and his supporter and successor, Reg Empey, were followers of Bill Craig who quit the party to follow Craig into the political wilderness in 1973.  But Trimble surprised everyone including both his former supporters and his critics by adopting policies advocated by Maginnis and governing following the Good Friday Agreement to the left of John Taylor as first minister . 

Until Trimble led a group of young professionals into the upper ranks of the UUP it had always been the party of the Big House--the landed gentry of the sort who ran the Conservative Party in Britain until the 1950s and 1960s. Northern Ireland in this regard as in so many others was about a generation behind England. Now the party is being run by small-town lawyers and professional farmers who would not look out of place in the Republican Party in the American Midwest or South or in Fine Gael in Ireland. 

McCallister has called for the party to leave the Executive and become the opposition, a role that is sorely needed in Northern Ireland. Mr. Kennedy is quite comfortable serving in the Executive. Nesbitt's vision for the future of the party is not really known at this time. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that McCallister defies the party's history, but if I were betting I would bet on one of the other two. Kennedy can brag about his skills as a minister and Nesbitt about his skills as a media-savvy personality. It would seem that the majority of the party is more interested in muddling through than in taking a bold course.  But as is now occurring in the Republican Party primaries in the United States with Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum splitting the conservative base and allowing the weak Mitt Romney to win with the support of the moderate minority, Kennedy and Nesbitt could split the centrist-conservative base and allow McCallister to prevail with a slim majority. This is unlikely, however, because the leadership election precedes in rounds with the weakest candidate being eliminated before the next round. Thus, with only three candidates it will take only two rounds at most to elect the new leader. If McCallister does not win a majority in the first round the supporters of the other two candidates are likely to team up and defeat him in the second round.

New Assembly Election in Northern Ireland--Lessons for Israel

On Thursday May 5, the UK held a referendum on replacing the current first-past-the-post franchise with the Alternative Vote (AV) for Westminster elections. The proposal was defeated by slightly better than a 2:1 margin throughout the UK. The referendum was held in conjunction with local council elections and in Northern Ireland an election for the Fourth Assembly. This has slowed the counting so that I don't have the final results in time for this post. 

Commentator on unionist politics John Coulter (scroll down to access May 5) predicted that the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the former ruling party in Northern Ireland from 1922 to 1972 in the original Northern Ireland parliament and the negotiators of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 under the leadership of David Trimble, would sink to fourth place in the Assembly with only 15 seats, only one seat behind the third-place Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). The UUP and SDLP were the ruling parties along with Sinn Fein in the First Assembly from December 1999 to October 2002. In the elections to the Second Assembly in November 2003 the Democratic Unionists (DUP) and Sinn Fein replaced the UUP and SDLP as the main unionist and nationalist parties respectively.

This was largely because the IRA had refused for several years to decommission its weapons as called for in the Good Friday Agreement. This made the First Assembly and the peace process an on-and-off affair. David Trimble resigned in July 2001 in an attempt to force Tony Blair to stand up to Sinn Fein and force the IRA to decommission as Blair promised in a side letter to Trimble in April 1998 when the Agreement was signed. Blair refused. Trimble's credibility both within his own party and within the wider unionist community was at stake over the decommissioning issue. Finally, in September 2005 the IRA decommissioned the bulk of its remaining weapons--but in a very secretive fashion that provided little assurance for the unionist community. By then the DUP had already decimated the UUP in the 2005 general election reducing it to a single seat in the Westminster Parliament. The UUP lost that seat, North Down, when it formed a common ticket with the Conservative Party for the 2010 election. If the UUP does come in fourth behind the SDLP it will demonstrate that it has not yet begun to recover from the shift in unionist politics.

What occurred in Northern Ireland is that the unionist electorate shifted rightward from 1998 to 2005 and then leftward as the DUP also shifted to steal the political clothes and policies of the UUP. The nationalist community also shifted rightward as nationalists began defecting from the SDLP to Sinn Fein starting in 2001. The SDLP has stopped the downward slide by hanging on to three Westminster seats in 2010, but has yet to begin to recover the ground occupied by Sinn Fein. The latter has unashamedly appropriated SDLP policies for itself as from 1982 to 1998 it was only concerned with the constitutional issue of Northern Ireland's subordination. Like the SDLP, Sinn Fein favored Irish unity but was prepared to support armed struggle, a euphemism for a combination of guerrilla warfare and terrorism, to achieve this.

Why does a blog devoted to the Middle East pay attention to Northern Ireland? Because Northern Ireland is the closest society to Israel. Northern Ireland shares five of the six salient features of Israeli politics, lacking only a class of military politicians because it lacks its own armed forces. Both Israel and Northern Ireland are siege societies and democracies--siege democracies--caused by being ruled by minorities within the region. The Jews are a minority within the Middle East, a region where Sunni Arab Muslims constitute the political core, where non-Arab Sunnis and non-Sunni Arabs constitute the next ring, and non-Arab Shia Muslims like the Iranians in the third ring, and the Jews are left in a group by themselves as both non-Arabs and non-Muslims. On the island of Ireland things are simpler with the only two significant groups being Irish Catholics and British Protestants. The unionists are the besieged majority within Northern Ireland, and a minority on the island and within the UK. Just as Arabs denied Israel the right to exist, the Irish state in the South claimed the territory of Northern Ireland from 1937 to 1999 as part of its constitution. The main difference is that the Irish state never supported the armed struggle of Irish republicans in the North.

The collapse of the UUP parallels the collapse of the Labor Party in Israel. But there is good news--Coulter predicts that the liberal Alliance Party will pick up an extra Assembly seat in the election for a total of eight. Too bad that this does not seem to be occurring in Israel with Meretz. The UUP's fortunes seems to indicate that it is very hard for a former ruling party to recover once the electorate has lost confidence in it. The Likud under first Ariel Sharon and then under Benjamin Netanyahu has begun to pay lip service to the policies of the Labor Party. Netanyahu has declared he supports a two-state solution, while doing everything in his power to avoid negotiations on one. So even as the electorate in Israel shifted to the right, Netanyahu may be shifting the Likud to the left to meet it in the center as the DUP has done in Northern Ireland. But because Israel has straight proportional representation (PR) franchise rather than the hybrid PR-STV (single transferable vote) system used in Northern Ireland and Ireland, trends will be less clear in Israel.

Is This the End of the Israeli Labor Party?

I saw this morning that former Prime Minister and present Defense Minister Ehud Barak, chairman of the Israel Labor Party, announced that he was quiting the party along with four other MKs to form a new faction known as Atzmaut or "Independence." This leaves the Labor Party with only eight MKs, its smallest caucus ever, and leaves Prime Minister Netanyahu with a smaller majority of 66 rather than 74. But it will be a more dependable and coherent coalition without Labor. And it leaves him with Barak, who since the government was formed as acted as its de facto foreign minister at least to the West. Barak is fulfilling the same function today that Moshe Dayan did for Menahem Begin's first Likud government in 1977-80 and that Shimon Peres did for Sharon's government after 2001.

I would argue that this is the most serious split in the history of Mapai/Labor. It is without a doubt the most serious split since former Chief of Staff Yigael Yadin formed the Democratic Movement for Change, known in Hebrew as Dash, in 1976 out of a number of former generals and personalities associated with the Labor Party and with the Free Center Party of the Right. But it is as least as serious as the Rafi split from Mapai in 1965 when former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, former Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, and Shimon Peres split off to form an independent list. This was largely about Ben-Gurion's need to spite the Old Guard of Mapai. Dayan, Peres and most of Rafi rejoined with Mapai and Ahdut Ha'Avoda to form the Labor Party three years later in 1968. Rafi never really established an independent infrastructure. Barak's split is likely to be more permanent. It may be as serious as the Faction B split from Mapai in 1944 that eventually led to the creation of the Ahdut Ha'Avoda (ironically it means the Unity of Labor) party a decade later.

Labor has been ailing for decades. First, its 29 years of continuous rule as Mapai/Labor from 1948 to 1977 led to its replacement by the Likud after several corruption scandals were exposed in the year before the election. Then its lack of a real serious policy on the Arab question led it to remain in the political wilderness until 1984, when it was forced to form a National Unity Government with the Likud. Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres remained locked in a bitter 20-year personal feud from 1974 to 1993, which they had inherited from their mentors, Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan, a few years before. Labor has been riven with major factional and personality splits since before its foundation. First there was the Tzeirim ("youngsters") versus the Old Guard within Mapai in the early 1960s. Then came Allon versus Dayan after Dayan was selected as defense minister over the more worthy Allon in June 1967 with outside support. Then Rabin and Peres took over the feud. Then Rabin agreed to the electoral "reform" of 1992 that gave all Israeli citizens a double vote. This severely weakened the dominance of the Israeli party system by the two major parties.

Labor has suffered from three main weaknesses that have killed other major parties in settler societies. First, Labor has over relied on former generals to provide it with electoral charisma at the expense of policy development. This trend began with Moshe Dayan back in 1959. It accelerated when the Labor Party was formed because Ahdut Ha'Avoda was basically a paramilitary party for the old Palmakh/Hagana leadership. After Rabin joined the party as ambassador to the U.S. there was a flood of former generals joining. Of all these generals four have stood out: Dayan, Allon, Rabin, and Barak.

Two foreign parties have relied on generals for electoral charisma: the American Whigs and the South African South Africa Party. The Whigs had three former generals in their stable. The first two, William H. Harrison and Zachary Taylor, were talented politicians. The third, Winfield Scott, was by far the best general but an incompetent candidate. He ran as the party's nominee in 1852 as the sectional split between North and South was beginning to split the party. He lost and two years later the party split on sectional lines without ever again running an independent candidate for president.

The South Africa Party was dominated by former Boer generals in the decade of 1910 to 1920. But after the National Party was formed in 1913 and SAP leader Louis Botha died of illness in 1919, the party was left with only a single general, Jan Smuts. Smuts led the party for thirty-one years and there was no satisfactory replacement for him. The party never developed a viable policy on the race question that could compete with the National Party's slogan of apartheid. The party, as the United Party after 1934, became a "me-too party" in opposition with too much stress on the word loyal in loyal opposition.

Second, related to the first was the party's domination by Peres and Rabin for two decades. Many talented potential leaders ended up either quitting politics altogether or defecting to the liberal Meretz party. What began as a trickle of talent in the early 1970s with Shulamit Aloni became a torrent by the 1990s. Then in 1995 Rabin was assassinated and Peres took over and lost another election. Peres had been regularly losing elections since 1974 because of his image as an unscrupulous schemer and a visionary dreamer who was naive. Barak temporarily changed this dynamic but he dropped out of politics, temporarily, after the failure of his premiership in 2000.

Third, because of Arafat's resort to violence with the Al-Aksa Intifada in October 2000, Labor was seen as a party that had naively trusted terrorists. The Ulster Unionist Party in Northern Ireland suffered from this same image after the IRA refused to disarm in accordance with the Good Friday Agreement. By the time the IRA finally disarmed in 2005 the UUP had been electorally broken and replaced by the DUP as the main unionist party. The UUP went from ten MPs in the late 1990s to none today largely because of this.

In the mid-2000s it seemed possible, at least to this observer, that the Israeli Center-Left might resurrect itself through a merger of Meretz with Labor and a concentration on domestic policy. This was a successful formula in 1854 when the antislavery Free Soil Party merged with the Northern Whigs to form the Republican Party. The Republicans then spent the next six years attracting antislavery Democrats and Americans (from the nativist Know Nothings) to become the dominant regional party in the North. In 1860 they won a presidential election by running a centrist from a battleground state and focusing on a few battleground states that the party lost in 1856. But it now appears that the rot has set in too far for this simple merger to work. Plus, the anti-Barak faction that remains in Labor is hopelessly divided among several different wannabe leaders.

Israel needs a new Center-Left party that will concentrate on domestic matters while having an openness to negotiate with the Arabs under certain conditions. If the party appears too eager to negotiate it will fall into the same trap that Labor and Meretz fell into. Maybe Kadima can fill that role?