After Jeffrey Donaldson’s bombshell exit, what next for Northern Ireland’s DUP?

05 April 2024 , 19:28

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As party reels, new leader Gavin Robinson faces a U.K. election that could cost him his seat.

The divided Democratic Unionists, in collective shock over the stunning fall from grace of their ex-leader Jeffrey Donaldson, are trying to figure out how to keep it from leading to electoral disaster for Northern Ireland’s main pro-British party.

What seems certain, based on POLITICO’s discussions this week with several DUP lawmakers, is that Donaldson’s protege, Gavin Robinson, won’t be challenged as interim leader after he stepped into the role on an emergency basis last week.

That’s largely because nobody else wants the job this side of the U.K. general election, expected later this year.

Donaldson stood down as party leader on Good Friday after being charged with rape and other sexual offenses. He is due in court later this month.

His resignation dealt an unprecedented blow to a party that had just returned to power-sharing with the Irish nationalist side of the community following a two-year standoff with Britain over post-Brexit trade rules. It could reopen core divisions Donaldson had only just repaired within a feud-prone party that backed Brexit but hates the outcome — a Northern Ireland still subject to EU goods laws.

Another vacancy at the top?

Hard-liners, privately critical of what they see as the willingness of new leader Robinson to compromise and end that Brexit standoff, told POLITICO there’s no need to challenge him now. They note his East Belfast seat in the House of Commons is the most vulnerable of all eight won by the DUP at the last election, meaning voters will soon have a chance to knock him out.

“Just watch what happens in East Belfast,” said one DUP lawmaker, who like others quoted in this story was granted anonymity to discuss internal party divisions frankly. “You can’t be leader if you lose your seat.”

Whenever Prime Minister Rishi Sunak calls the general election, the DUP faces a tough battle to retain all its Commons seats and counter the prevailing narrative of unionism in terminal decline versus the Irish republicans of Sinn Féin.

That challenge already looked difficult for the DUP following its January U-turn over re-entering a power-sharing government at Stormont — the Northern Ireland Assembly — alongside Sinn Féin. Initial opinion polls showed the DUP losing votes as a result.

In his tense months of negotiations with the U.K. government over the future of cross-border trade with the neighboring Republic of Ireland, Donaldson built a tight-knit DUP negotiating team of realists around him. That grouping appears vulnerable now that he’s gone.

Donaldson sold his Safeguarding the Union deal with Sunak as “ending the Irish Sea border.” Many of his own MPs never supported it, however, agreeing instead with the DUP’s chief external critic, Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister, who branded “the Donaldson Deal” a sellout.

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The DUP faces a tough battle to retain all its Commons seats and counter the prevailing narrative of unionism in terminal decline versus the Irish republicans of Sinn Féin | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

Robinson may find it difficult to lead a coherent DUP election campaign if, as some fear, his own fellow MPs snipe at the compromise deal he helped to strike by Donaldson’s side.

“The ‘Donaldson Deal’ could very easily be rebranded the ‘Robinson Deal,’ because he was right beside Jeffrey the entire way in negotiating that deal. It’s going to become a point of attack as we face a general election,” said a second DUP lawmaker, who supports the U-turn and return to government at Stormont, and doesn’t want a hard-liner to succeed Robinson.

“We need to defend against these attacks with unity. It will be a problem if, as a party, we cannot fully back the deal on the doorsteps and instead put our divisions on display.”

Vulnerable

Also vulnerable to an internal DUP putsch is Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly, who in 2022 was picked by Donaldson to fill his own Northern Ireland Assembly seat so he could remain an MP at Westminster. Even her supporters concede that her personal democratic deficit — she was a longtime DUP special adviser twice appointed to Stormont, never elected — means she cannot afford missteps in office.

So far, Little-Pengelly has starred in her new bridge-building role alongside First Minister Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin — but the hardline faction grumbles, just as it did with the DUP’s first power-sharing leader, the late Ian Paisley, that she appears to be getting on a little too well with the enemy.

“I don’t want to see her swinging any more hurleys,” said a third DUP lawmaker, referring to Little-Pengelly’s recent joint appearance with O’Neill at a Gaelic sports club in Sinn Féin’s power base of Catholic west Belfast. A hurley is the bat used in the native Irish sports of hurling and camogie — games that some particularly snarly unionists still excoriate as “the IRA at play.”

Robinson, 39, a former barrister who became deputy leader last year as Donaldson sought to position loyal lieutenants around him, held his first press conference as interim leader Thursday — and still looked and sounded stunned by his sudden elevation.

“The last six days have been incredibly difficult and shocking, not just for us within the Democratic Unionist Party but for the community right throughout Northern Ireland,” he said. In private meetings with lawmakers and grassroots members this week, he said, they shared “a determination and recognition that what has gone before us is not reflective of us. It is not attributed to us.”

A fourth DUP lawmaker interviewed by POLITICO, who supported Donaldson but wants to see Robinson put clear blue water between himself and his predecessor, described the mood inside party ranks as “so unbelievable, so weird, so surreal — I’ve never experienced anything like it.”

This politician described a sense of whiplash over how Donaldson had won praises in Washington during St. Patrick’s Day celebrations only to become a political pariah by Easter. “Sir Jeffrey was supposed to be the one to steady the ship,” he said. “I’m just bracing for the next shock now.”

Donaldson is currently suspended from the party and all traces of him have been removed from the DUP website. He is charged with rape, gross indecency and indecent assault, with his wife Eleanor facing charges of aiding and abetting his alleged offenses. Donaldson denies the charges; his wife has not commented.

The DUP isn’t pushing Donaldson to resign as MP for Lagan Valley, one of the party’s safest seats southwest of Belfast. A by-election could give a powerful early campaign platform for Alliance, the middle-ground party that also is Robinson’s main challenger in East Belfast whenever the general election comes.

Nightmare scenario

Elections analyst David McCann projected that if the DUP loses even small fractions of its base — to pro-EU moderates on the left, and to the Sinn Féin-bashing Traditional Unionist Voice on the right — it would cost the DUP two of its eight Commons seats. Alliance Party leader Naomi Long would win East Belfast, he argued, while the Ulster Unionists’ Robin Swann would take South Antrim.

Donaldson’s protege, Gavin Robinson | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

In this scenario, Sinn Féin would hold its seven seats and potentially gain one, overtaking the DUP at Westminster, where the Irish republicans refuse even to take their seats in protest against the very existence of Northern Ireland as part of the U.K.

McCann envisions a morning news bulletin that would end Robinson’s tenuous hold on the leadership and plunge his party — and perhaps Northern Ireland — into renewed political turmoil.

“DUP leader defeated and they’ve lost top spot as Sinn Féin completes the hat trick,” McCann said, referring to Sinn Féin’s poll-topping performances in the 2022 Stormont election and 2023 council elections.

“That’s the nightmare scenario that’s potentially facing the DUP the day after the election.”