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| Europe |
| Ireland's governing party crushed in polls |
| 2011-02-27 |
| [Pak Daily Times] Ireland's ruling Fianna Fail party suffered a crushing defeat in elections dominated by the economic collapse and an EU-IMF bailout, exit polls showed on Saturday, with the opposition poised to take power. Prime Minister Brian Cowen's party, which has ruled Ireland for most of the last 80 years, slumped to its worst ever general election result with just 15.1 percent of the vote, the poll for state broadcaster RTE said. As widely expected, the election has seen Dublin become the first government to fall as a result of the debt crisis in the 17-country eurozone. The main opposition Fine Gael party is set to form the new government and its leader Enda Kenny will be prime minister after it took 36.1 percent in Friday's election, although it failed to win enough votes to govern alone. Fine Gael is on course to take more than 70 seats in the 166-seat Dail, or lower parliament, analysts said. The centrist party's deputy director of elections, Frank Flannery, told RTE that if the exit poll was correct "it was an absolutely amazing and historic election". Noel Dempsey, a former minister in the Fianna Fail government, conceded that he would be happy if his party emerged with more than 20 seats, less than a third of its total in the outgoing parliament. "It's looking pretty grim, I have to say," he said. Fine Gael will need support from other parties or independents to form a government, and could turn to Labour, who secured 20.5 percent, according to the exit poll of 3,500 voters by Millward Brown Lansdowne. Fianna Fail was the target of public anger over the debt crisis that crippled Ireland's once-vibrant "Celtic Tiger" economy and forced it to agree to an 85-billion-euro ($115-billion) bailout with the European Union and International Monetary Fund last November. Cowen had conceded defeat even before polls closed, telling local media Friday as he cast his ballot in the central county of Offaly that his party would now "regroup". "I have always been proud of who we are and what we are. This organisation will come again," he said. |
| Posted by:Fred |