DUBLIN — Is Ireland ready for a surprise game of “Simon says”?
Leo Varadkar’s out-of-the-blue resignation as prime minister Wednesday forces the shocked lawmakers in his centrist Fine Gael party to pick a quick successor as Taoiseach, the official Irish office title that means “the chief.”
But who’s most likely to take the reins of Ireland’s three-party government as it faces a string of election battles in the coming months?
Most analysts agree on one point: Ireland’s next prime minister is most likely to be named Simon.
The affable, media-savvy Harris is the party’s rising star — or at least he was until Varadkar demoted him in 2020 to a second-tier Cabinet post overseeing third-level education. Since then Harris, still only 37, has been biding his time, waiting for Varadkar to stumble and fall.
Harris is widely liked within Fine Gael ranks and is seen as a particularly sharp-edged debater in his verbal sparring with the Sinn Féin opposition — a good quality with local and European elections looming in June and a general election an uncertain matter of months away.
The university dropout is renowned for his political ambition, having gained a seat on the most powerful parliamentary committee when he was elected as Dáil Éireann’s youngest member in 2011. And when Fine Gael remained in office following near defeat in the 2016 election, Harris signaled his determination to be a future leader by taking on the toughest Cabinet portfolio: health.
But when Varadkar pushed successfully for the party leadership in 2017, Harris backed his opponent, Simon Coveney — cementing his status as a potentially dangerous younger rival to the new chief.
Unusually for an Irish politician, Harris has never shied away when asked if he’d like to be Taoiseach. Many within Fine Gael say the leadership is finally his to lose between now and the April 6 closing date before the party’s lawmakers are balloted.
But there’s another Simon with a say in the matter — the former foreign minister from Ireland’s second city of Cork, Simon Coveney.
Coveney was born into a well-heeled political family and inherited his parliamentary seat when his father Hugh, a former government minister, fell from a cliff in 1998 while walking near the family home.
Polite to a fault, Coveney was seen as lacking the killer instinct during his leadership bout with Varadkar in 2017, and could struggle once again to get the better of the spikier Harris. Whereas the latter offers snappy soundbites, Coveney favors the comprehensive soliloquy, a risky approach in an arena where words are so easily twisted out of context.
But Coveney came close to winning in 2017 by appealing, in particular, to lawmakers from outside greater Dublin where two-thirds of the country lives. To win the coming election, Fine Gael will need to compete for rural and small-town votes beyond Dublin’s suburban sprawl.
If Varadkar had his choice, McEntee would be his successor — and so become Ireland’s first female prime minister.
Like Coveney, she became a politician because of a family tragedy. Her father, a lawmaker from Meath northwest of Dublin, took his own life in 2012.
Like Harris, she’s only 37 and gained rapid entry to the Cabinet table, first as junior Europe minister at the height of the Brexit battles, then as justice minister. She’s already made history by becoming the first Cabinet minister to gain rights to maternity leave without losing her post in the process.
But her ministerial performance since has raised doubt she commands enough internal support to seek the leadership now. She weathered a confidence vote following her shaky oversight of the riots that tore through central Dublin last November.
If ever Fine Gael needed a credible leadership figure to take over, Donohoe would be that man. But that’s also the problem, because Donohoe’s ambitions have already clearly grown far beyond his native Dublin.
As finance minister, the ultra-diplomatic Donohoe so impressed his European counterparts in Brussels that they elected him leader of their umbrella group for eurozone ministers. So well did he handle this EU-level consensus-building post that, when he was obliged to step away from his Irish finance portfolio in a mandatory coalition reshuffle, his European counterparts bent the rules to let him stay in the Eurogroup chair.
In recent months Donohoe has chosen not to quash speculation that he’d love a new international role in Brussels — or perhaps at the International Monetary Fund, where he was only recently ruled out as a candidate to be its next managing director. With one eye on his own exit from domestic politics, it doesn’t make obvious sense for Donohoe to take the Fine Gael reins now — unless the party demands its senior statesman take charge.
It’s always useful in Ireland, when trying to predict the future, to see what the bookies have to say. Quick off the mark, Paddy Power lists Harris as the prohibitive favorite, with Coveney and Donohoe far behind in the race for second place, and McEntee the dark horse.