alliance – Page 2 – Slugger O'Toole

Well, well, well-#AE2022 and that Lucid Talk poll

Sarah Creighton on May 22, 2021, 11:06 am

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It’s early days, minds could change later, but the Belfast Telegraph’s latest poll will send shivers down the DUP’s spine. According to Lucid Talk, support for the DUP has dropped to 16%, the same as Alliance. Sinn Fein sits at 25%. Doug Beattie will take comfort from the figure for the UUP, up two points to 14%. A Sinn Fein First Minister has been a possibility since the 2017 Assembly election. Based on these figures, Sinn Fein will clinch the …

Where can the Unionist parties gain seats at the next election?

David McCann on May 19, 2021, 1:50 pm

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The DUP has started messaging ahead of next years assembly election that the combined Unionist parties need just five seats to remove the protocol. Now this claim has been fact checked that they can only remove certain parts, rather than all of it. But I thought it would be interesting to look at where Unionism could potentially find those gains. To start with, this is a very tall order for the combined Unionist parties. If the results of elections from …

AE22: Targets for the main parties next year

David McCann on February 10, 2021, 11:04 am

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It is 15 months away, but lockdown boredom and messing around with numbers, he is the lay of the land going into the next Assembly Election. Alliance The happiest people looking at this are the Alliance Party, gains to be seen across Northern Ireland and on numbers, none of their 8 seats are under threat. Around 10 target seats are there for them, with varying degrees of effort required. The low hanging fruit are places like North Belfast and South …

What could the surge of centre ground parties mean for a possible 2020 Assembly election?

Peter Donaghy (Salmon of Data) on December 15, 2019, 9:45 pm

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The results of the 2019 general election have confirmed that the electoral map of Northern Ireland has been redrawn. The Alliance Party broke out of its traditional electoral stronghold in and around Belfast to make strong gains across Northern Ireland, polling 16.8% to come third in the popular vote behind the DUP (30.6%) and Sinn Féin (22.8%). With possible fresh Assembly elections coming in 2020, the rise of centre ground in Northern Ireland politics is likely to lead to potentially …

Northern Ireland #GE2019 results roundup

Peter Donaghy (Salmon of Data) on December 13, 2019, 3:06 pm

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With the results of the 2019 general election in, it is clear that the results of the local and European elections earlier this year were no fluke and the surge of the centre ground in Northern Ireland politics looks here to stay. The chart above shows how the parties performed in terms of vote share at this election, compared with all Northern Ireland elections over the course of the decade. The total unionist vote being at 43% is the “new …

Women, Northern Ireland and the 2019 General Election

Soapbox on November 8, 2019, 11:25 am

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Clare Rice is Research Assistant on the ‘Performing Identities: Post-Brexit Northern Ireland and the reshaping of 21st Century Governance’ project at Newcastle University, a PhD Candidate and TA at QUB, and an occasional commentator. Twitter: @Clare_Rice_ We are less than a week into the 2019 Westminster election campaign and already we have seen a concerning pattern begin to emerge. It isn’t unusual for sizeable numbers of MPs to decide to step down from elected politics (see this useful overview), but …

What we can’t do is permit an approach which divides rather than unites, regardless of any other areas of agreement.

Soapbox on October 2, 2019, 10:48 am

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SOAPBOX: Alliance Councillor Emmet McDonough-Brown takes issue with his Green Party colleague Councillor Brian Smyth who last week wrote on Slugger about flags, a vexed question which arouses deep passions in our politics.

A case for pro-remain cooperation.

David McCann on September 28, 2019, 2:20 pm

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Over the past month we have heard about the impending election that seems to never be coming. Whether it is next year or in a few weeks there has been a debate not just locally but in other parts of the UK about some form of pro-remain cooperation taking place. Now, I know Alliance have ruled this out from their end and that is their right to do so. The Greens, Sinn Fein and the SDLP have expressed some sort …

#GE19 or #GE20: what to expect

Niall Kelly on September 1, 2019, 9:22 pm

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With speculation mounting that we may see a general election either by the end of the year, or early in 2020 now feels like an appropriate time to look at the results of the 2017 Westminster election to remind us of the current state of play. Following a walking holiday in Wales at Easter 2017 Theresa May called a snap general election in order to give herself an increased, working majority in the Commons so that she could deliver …

Slugger TV looks at a future Westminster Election

David McCann on August 30, 2019, 6:43 pm

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Slugger TV: Episode 29 from Northern Visions NvTv on Vimeo. This month we looked at some local marginal seats with Chris Donnelly and Niall Kelly David McCannDavid McCann holds a PhD in North-South relations from University of Ulster. You can follow him on twitter @dmcbfs

Party Leaders reactions to Prorogation of Parliament

David McCann on August 28, 2019, 5:27 pm

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The SDLP Leader, Colum Eastwood; Proroguing your parliament to enforce the will of a government that has no democratic legitimacy for an act that has no majority support is the behaviour of a tin-pot dictator. Boris Johnson has stepped far outside the acceptable norms for a functioning democracy and he must be reined in. “This is a moment for political courage. Every MP should take a stand in this moment, to defend the interests of people across these islands but …

49 MLAs send letter to Tusk backing the backstop

David McCann on August 22, 2019, 12:27 pm

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Dear Mr Tusk, The proposed date of the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, 31 October, is fast approaching. As leaders of local political parties who represent the cross-community majority who voted to remain in the EU we have grave concerns about the current trajectory toward a no-deal Brexit and the impact this would have on our economy, our border and community cohesion. An analysis carried out by the Northern Ireland Civil Service has predicted job losses in the region …

How often do the parties in Belfast City Hall actually vote together?

Niall Kelly on July 1, 2019, 11:40 am

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One of the great debates, and I use that term loosely, we have had over the past decade in Northern Irish politics is whether the Alliance Party are more nationalist or unionist. Instead of letting Alliance, and the people who vote for them, define what the party stands for, certain elements of the political establishment, in particular political unionism, have gone out of their way to attempt to define Alliance as being somewhere on the spectrum between anti-unionist and pro-republican. …

The Centre is Broad, Not Narrow

Soapbox on May 18, 2019, 10:08 am

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Stephen Donnan Dalzell is an LGBT activist and writer The local elections in Northern Ireland just a few weeks ago were not like those previously. If you have been following the results and are familiar with how elections in Northern Ireland usually pan out then you may have noticed something different. In a part of the United Kingdom that has been a sticking point during the Brexit negotiations and who’s border with the Republic of Ireland has been a stumbling …

Post election analysis

Niall Kelly on May 7, 2019, 11:27 am

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The seats The ballots have been cast, the votes have been counted, the results are in and the spinning has begun. Despite thoughts before the election that both the DUP and Sinn Féin would consolidate their support and increase their seats, the DUP managed to lose 8 seats and Sinn Féin saw no change to their total. The failure of the two big parties to make gains did not, however, translate into victories for the UUP and SDLP, with both …

Centre ground parties advance and the DUP consolidate the unionist vote at the 2019 local elections

Peter Donaghy (Salmon of Data) on May 4, 2019, 5:26 pm

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The centre ground parties, and the Alliance Party in particular, have made significant gains at the May 2019 local elections. With all of the first preference votes now counted, the Alliance Party made the largest gain of the share of the first-preference vote, up by 4.9% from the 6.6% received in 2014 to 11.5% in this year’s poll. The Green Party more than doubled their share of the vote from 0.9% in 2014 to 2.1%, whilst People Before Profit received …

Ticket Splitters

Niall Kelly on April 22, 2019, 7:37 pm

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The 2014 European and Local Government elections were held on the same day, unlike this time around when the Council election will be held three weeks before the European election. Some might think that the local government election results will be a sure-fire way to predict the results of the European election but there are a number of reasons why this might not be the case. As I have mentioned before, no party is standing in every DEA in the …

Slugger Verdict: ranking the PEBs of #LE19

David McCann on April 22, 2019, 12:00 pm

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Our crack panel sat down and reviewed the party election broadcasts hitting your screens for #LE19. Listen to our musings – frivolous and more serious – about messaging, target audiences, music and aesthetics as well as politics in our podcast with Allison Morris, Chris Brown, Alan Meban and David McCann.

Council elections 2019- all you need to know Part II

Niall Kelly on April 16, 2019, 9:01 am

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Following on from my previous post looking at the runners and riders for the local government election, I’ll now drill down in a bit more detail to look at each council and some of the key races. In a previous post I spoke about how all the parties will be telling us how they want our votes, but in reality no party in the 2014 election stood in every single DEA, meaning that not everyone who wanted to vote for …

Poster Wars

Niall Kelly on April 15, 2019, 11:28 am

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Before the local government election notice of election was published on Tuesday 26th March we started to see the familiar sight of election posters appearing on lampposts across Northern Ireland. Love them or loathe them, posters are a mainstay of elections in Northern Ireland and in the Republic in a way that they are not in GB. Parties compete to be the first to get their posters up to ensure they get the best positions; at busy junctions and outside …