Varadkar is David Cameron for people who dislike the word "conservative," Exhibit I've-lost-count.
Eamon Ryan makes for a perfect Nick Clegg in this analogy.
No, not really. The Irish Clegg was Éamonn Gilmore.
Clegg took over a party which might not have been particularly internally-coherent but all the various strands (rural-dwellers in the Scottish Highlands, mid-Wales, and the west of England; young and ethnic minority voters disenchanted with Labour over Iraq and student fees; suburbanites with a social conscience) had one thing in common - they were "not Tory". Clegg consciously decided to explode that coalition in the delusionbelief that it could be replaced by a clone of the FDP.
You can argue that the Greens cover part of the old Lib Dem coalition, but only one part - upper middle-class urban voters who consider themselves "progressive". The Greens have never been a sizeable party in the way that the Lib Dems were and they have always been quite ideologically-coherent; they are essentially a "fundi" Green party choc-a-bloc with cranks of all stripes but one not much if at all concerned with economic equality or redistribution. They were carried into government more by Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough than by their own inherent appeal. Unlike Clegg, they haven't done a U-turn on their core policies; instead they have been largely indulged by the two larger parties on the Green Party activists' priorities in exchange for support on other issues.
The problems are that:
a) the Greens' priorities are massively unpopular beyond the "progressive" middle class and are especially so with rural and working-class voters;
b) the three Green ministers are seen as detached from reality and incompetent.
Very interesting points! I should clarify, I meant no real reference to deep ideology in the comparison. And I’d agree that Eamonn Gilmore and Joan Burton compare similarly well.
I merely meant in the sense of “third party leader joins right-leaning/neoliberal coalition, betrays voters, senior coalition partner blames literally everything that goes wrong on them, party and leader’s popularity collapses as a result.
The way Eamon Ryan seems to carry the can for every unpopular coalition policy makes me think of Clegg.
