The SDLP gathered last weekend to formally elect their new leader. Claire Hanna takes over the once-dominant party of Irish nationalism, which, over the past two decades, has become battered and bruised by poor election results and a struggle to define itself in a post-Good Friday Agreement age.
Can Hanna succeed where so many of her immediate predecessors have failed? The answer to this question comes from the misguided notion that the leader alone can solve the SDLP’s problem.
Hanna is a formidable force. Through the base she has built in south Belfast, she has demonstrated that she can see off some of the main rivals who have been successful in taking votes from the SDLP in the past.
The question that remains is whether she can translate this to other constituencies and other types of elections across Northern Ireland.
Even if she can, it is important for the SDLP to ask itself some deep questions as it attempts to reboot with a new leader.
The first one is: What does the party see as its new mission into the future?
The SDLP played a substantial role in achieving the Good Friday Agreement, but what is the big objective that it wants to achieve now? And does that objective inspire people to get involved with the SDLP and make it the vehicle to achieve it?
The other issue for the party is more boring and that is organisation. Put simply, Sinn Féin and the Alliance Party do this better than the SDLP.
One of the underestimated aspects of Alliance’s rise is the reorganisation that took place under David Ford. That meant bringing new faces into the party over time and ruthlessly targeting achievable gains.
From 2007-2016, the party did not tolerate or waste time on seats it could not win. It threw everything into assembly seats such as South Belfast, and parliamentary seats such as East Belfast. Momentum begot momentum, and it sits today with 17 MLAs.
The SDLP needs to do the same thing. The boring but essential work of organisation needs to be the number one priority for the next two years.
That means recognising that a party with fewer votes needs to be smarter about where it runs serious campaigns and where it does not.
It also means bringing in new voices and then giving them a real role in the party. For all the talk of new media, that is still no substitute for getting activists to do old politics.
Something else Hanna is well placed to deliver is positioning the SDLP as a leading part of an all-island social democratic political force.
North and south, this part of politics is in a mess. The SDLP has struggled here, Irish Labour is struggling in the Republic, and the Social Democrats are not doing much better.
A long-term piece of work for the Hanna leadership should be pushing this forward over the next few years and adding some credibility to the social democratic New Ireland image that she was speaking about on Saturday.
If the SDLP recovers, it will not be overnight. It took it decades to get into this position, and it will take some years to get out of it.
A new leader alone does not immediately mean success at the next election. It will need to be a team effort that is achieved patiently and, at times, quietly over the next few years.
The SDLP will need to be patient to succeed. It will have to accept that it will take many years of hard work to regain the political initiative. Claire will have to lead decisively, but her party members also need to recognise that they need to follow her direction.
At such a low base, the party does not have much more left to lose. They will sink or swim together, and their new leader cannot achieve success alone.
The SDLP played a substantial role in achieving the Good Friday Agreement, but what is the big objective that it wants to achieve now?