In an interview on NVTV a few days before the election, I suggested that the UUP should be able to win 18 seats, maybe even 19 on a good day. But, I added: “If they don’t hold South Belfast then they will do pretty badly everywhere else.”
Well, they didn’t hold South Belfast and with just 87,302 votes (12.6 per cent) recorded their worst ever election result. They’re down to just one MLA across the four Belfast constituencies; and their share of the overall vote across Northern Ireland was down over 3 per cent from the 16 per cent achieved in the 2014 local government elections.
Two other constituencies need comment. Having won the South Antrim parliamentary seat in 2015, the UUP would have expected to consolidate that victory by winning a second Assembly seat. They didn’t. They dropped 4000 votes and 10 per cent, meaning that they could be in trouble in 2020. In Fermanagh/South Tyrone—where they also won the parliamentary seat (thanks to a unionist pact)—they dropped over 3000 votes and 6.5 per cent on their performance in the 2011 Assembly election.
In other words, this is a very troubling performance for the party. They had expected to make gains, particularly across Belfast and their two parliamentary seats, but made none. They’ll be happy to have won back the three seats lost when Basil McCrea, John McCallister and David McNarry defected after the last election, but as Mike Nesbitt noted before the poll: “Coming back with 16 doesn’t represent growth.”
Why did they do so badly? After ‘modest’ progress in 2014 and winning two parliamentary seats last year, there was a general expectation that they could gain between two and four seats. DUP sources told me they were prepared for UUP gains and a few losses of their own: “We’d settle for 35,” one of them told me. Even Arlene Foster said: “Few people, myself included, believed that we could emulate Peter Robinson’s outstanding achievement of 38 seats in 2011.” Had the DUP won another 500 votes or so, they would have ended up with 40 seats.
Some in the UUP blame the ‘fear factor’ behind the ‘Arlene for first minister’ campaign. Others say the party lost support because of an “increasingly liberal” stance on issues like same-sex marriage. Campaigners in North Belfast told me that votes were “thrown away” when Rev Lesley Carroll, the candidate, “seemed to go soft on abortion reform.” In East Belfast it soon became clear that the two candidates were, to all intents and purposes, running separate campaigns. And in South Belfast, one seasoned UUP campaigner noted, more in sorrow than anger: “Michael McGimpsey left us in the lurch at the last minute when he pulled out and we were lumbered with the lad (Rodney McCune) who got us our worst ever Westminster result last year.”
What seems to have done most damage to the UUP, though, was the simple fact that Arlene Foster is popular across broader unionism. She is liked in a way that neither Robinson nor Paisley ever was and that made it easier for some existing and former UUP voters (who have never voted DUP) to jump ship. Nesbitt—and, in fairness to him, the UUP campaign was better than 2011—couldn’t compete with someone who knows what makes unionism tick. And, unlike Robinson, there were no sticks to beat her with. As I noted a few weeks ago, the DUP was always going to win comfortably; but I didn’t expect them to do it in such spectacular style.
So a bad election for Nesbitt: but not necessarily catastrophic. The next elections are not due until 2019, giving the UUP enough time to get noticed—although it must be for the right reasons—in opposition. The party also needs to work out what went wrong on May 5 and whether it can address the problem. It also needs to prepare itself for raiding exercises by the DUP. As one of their most thoughtful insiders told me: “The long term problem for the UUP is that there is no realistic prospect of anything other than marginal gains this side of 2026 and maybe not even then. That will focus the mind of ambitious people who will see preferment possible in the DUP.”
He’s right, of course. Nesbitt is no longer seen as a ‘winner’ for the UUP and with a reduction in MLAs due in 2021 (down to either 90 or 85) the DUP will look the better bet. Nesbitt has to steady nerves, restore confidence and do damage to the DUP. He will also need to tread carefully when it comes to socio/moral issues.
The end of his first election cycle as leader has seen the UUP return to where it was in 2011. He didn’t expect this result. I wonder what he’ll do now?
