Meet Simon Harris, Ireland’s first TikTok prime minister

DUBLIN – When Leo Varadkar shocked his party and the nation by quitting as Ireland’s prime minister, only one politician appeared ready to seize the moment: Simon Harris.

The two clichés now most commonly applied to Harris, 37, are that he’s been “a young man in a hurry” and will be Ireland’s first “TikTok Taoiseach.” Both are true — and essential to understanding why Harris so convincingly won the race to become leader of the governing Fine Gael party and, soon, Ireland’s first Millennial premier.

By his own estimation, Harris has climbed the political ladder “a lot faster than I expected.” Next month, when lawmakers formally elect him Taoiseach, the Irish office title meaning “chief” and pronounced “tee-shuck,” Harris will become Ireland’s youngest-ever prime minister.

His victory was assured when no other candidates stood against him, turning the contest to replace Varadkar, who stood down without warning Wednesday, into a one-horse race that ended Sunday.

Colleagues and political pundits long have billed the gangly County Wicklow lawmaker as a future Taoiseach thanks to his sharp oratory and listening skills, as well as his positive energy and work ethic. He’d already been identified as a natural politician as a teenager, growing up in a coastal commuter town south of Dublin, the son of a taxi driver and a special-needs assistant.

At the age of 15 Simon was handing out leaflets door-to-door for a local lawmaker, and was soon himself organizing his first community meetings. At 18 Harris started work as a parliamentary aide inside Leinster House; a year later he won election to two local councils, dropping out of university to enter political life full-time.

By 24 he was representing his native county of Wicklow in Dáil Éireann, the key lower house of the Oireachtas, Ireland’s two-chamber parliament, at a threshold moment for Fine Gael which had just enjoyed its biggest election victory. For his maiden speech Harris was given the honor of nominating then-Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny as Ireland’s next Taoiseach.

He gained an immediate seat on the most powerful parliamentary committee, Public Accounts. When Fine Gael suffered significant electoral losses in 2016 but survived atop a fragile minority government, he was thrust into the most difficult Cabinet post, health.

While Harris fared no better in delivering concrete results than his predecessors, he displayed a social media-friendly likability that rendered him seemingly immune to political damage in a post battling labor unrest, crowded hospital corridors, nightmare waiting lists, cost overruns and malpractice scandals.

Brother in arms

It helped Harris’ reputation as health minister that he had started his teenage political career by demanding better government support for special-needs children, citing his own younger brother Adam, who has autism.

When Varadkar succeeded Kenny as Fine Gael chief and prime minister in 2017, Harris kept the health portfolio despite backing Varadkar’s challenger Simon Coveney — and even though Varadkar already had Harris pegged as a potential rival.

That year Harris married Caoimhe Wade, his longtime girlfriend and a cardiac nurse at a Dublin hospital for children. The Harrises have settled in his childhood home of Greystones, one of Ireland’s wealthiest communities boasting the most expensive property outside Dublin. They’ve gone on to have a girl and a boy, all documented in the tabloids with help from Harris’ own social media posts.

It is a key characteristic of Harris the politician: ease at merging the personal and political on his active social media pages, including Facebook, Instagram and particularly TikTok.

His comfort with social media proved a powerful base for voter engagement when, following a 2020 election that left a weakened Fine Gael limping into a new three-party coalition government, Varadkar demoted Harris to a second-tier Cabinet post overseeing third-level education.

The brief offered an ideal base for Harris to travel weekly from campus to campus, microblogging and selfie-shooting across the nation, building an image as a lawmaker more connected to the concerns of teens and 20-somethings struggling to start families and secure homes.

As Harris prepares to become Taoiseach his TikTok followers are approaching 100,000, more than 10 times that of his party’s account. As usual, in his latest post, Harris talks straight into the camera, thanks his hundreds of thousands of viewers for their “friendship,” and notes how far he’s come from his first political activism “as an opinionated, moody teenager.”

He keeps his comments open on all forums but typically doesn’t reply to any of the hundreds of angry messages demanding an immediate general election. The government’s five-year term doesn’t run out until March 2025.

Flash in the pan?

This looming deadline begs the question: Will Harris be a flash in the prime ministerial pan, or can he lead Fine Gael against the polling odds into an historic fourth straight government?

The majority of Fine Gael lawmakers who backed him hope so, even though it’s striking how many of those lawmakers already have announced their departure from politics at the end of the term.

Opinion polls in coming weeks should register whether Fine Gael gains a meaningful bounce from Varadkar’s replacement with Harris, who plans a series of face-to-face voter events nationwide ahead of Fine Gael’s annual conference April 6 in the western university city of Galway. He’ll be elected Taoiseach April 9 when the Dáil reconvenes from Easter recess.

As things stand, Fine Gael faces an uphill battle to regain voters lost since 2011, many of them to rural independent lawmakers as the party tacked to the left in alliance with mostly liberal coalition partners.

Fighting Sinn Féin

The great challenge to Fine Gael’s re-election will be Sinn Féin, the Irish republican party once rooted overwhelmingly in the neighboring U.K. territory of Northern Ireland, but now the most popular party south of the border as well. Sinn Féin won the most votes in the 2020 election but didn’t run enough candidates to capitalize on those numbers — an error certain not to be repeated.

While Fine Gael’s main coalition partner, Fianna Fáil, hasn’t quite shut the door on a potential post-election partnership with Sinn Féin, Harris has made it one of his first political acts.

In his weekend victory speech to party faithful, Harris drew the strongest round of applause when he drew a stark red line between his party and Sinn Féin, noting it had never severed links with the outlawed Provisional IRA. He recalled how, only a few days before, a convicted cop killer from the IRA had received a paramilitary sendoff with his coffin draped in the Irish national flag.

“Fine Gael stands for law and order. This is the party that established An Garda Síochána. We stand on the side of the gardaí,” Harris said, referring to Ireland’s national police force. “We stand for streets that are safe, and crime that is never allowed to go unchecked. And in a week where I saw the tricolor of this republic draped over the coffin of a garda killer, I say: Shame! Let’s take our flag back!”

Sinn Féin has spent little energy attacking Harris directly, maintaining a public focus instead on trouncing Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the third government party, the Greens, in European Parliament and local council elections in June.

The immediate challenge for Harris will be how much to shuffle the Fine Gael ministers in the government to potentially weed out respected veterans in favor of next-generation allies. It’s hard for any new leader to claim to be an agent for change when so much of his existing front bench sounds worn out after 13 years in power.