Brexit halo fades for Irish leader fighting for survival

Bloomberg

As Irish PM Leo Varadkar welcomed European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, there was plenty of noise. Here was the EU’s top official coming to Dublin on the first full day of an election campaign.
But as von der Leyen commended him for his statesmanship during Britain’s divorce from the EU, outside the building that houses Ireland’s key ministries police were corralling protesting farmers as they hurled invective at the man they blame for neglecting them.
“We are broke, and the government knows we are broke,” said Vincent Harrington, who that mid-January morning had driven 160 kilometres in his tractor to join a convoy aiming to snarl up the Irish capital. “Leo Varadkar doesn’t understand.”
Varadkar’s premiership has been defined by Brexit. Just months after helping broker the most contentious part of Britain’s deal with the EU, the Irish leader is embroiled in a serious fight to keep power. His trouble is that kudos abroad isn’t translating into support at home as Ireland moves on from the painful saga imposed upon it by its larger neighbour.
To his counterparts across Europe, Varadkar, 41, is the
cool head who delivered a viable agreement that kept the land border with the UK province of Northern Ireland free of checkpoints.
Polls suggest enough voters may abandon him in the February 8 election, Varadkar’s first as prime minister. Fianna Fail, the party that led Ireland into an international bailout after Greece during Europe’s debt crisis in 2010, is making a comeback. Varadkar’s Fine Gael has trailed Fianna Fail in every opinion poll published since the election was called. His party stood at 21% in a Red C/Business Post poll, behind Fianna Fail and also Sinn Fein, both on 24%. Indeed, Varadkar has a one in seven chance of keeping power.
Fine Gael “had hoped to concentrate on Brexit—the idea presumably being to show competence there would suggest competence on other issues,” said Eoin O’Malley, a politics professor at Dublin City University.
The gulf between how Varadkar is viewed inside and outside Ireland was on full display again last week. It was the turn of Michel Barnier, chief Brexit negotiator and now head of the EU’s task force on relations with the UK, to visit Dublin. The two men looked relaxed, posing together outside the neoclassical Government Buildings a few days before Britain left the EU on January 31.
In truth, Varadkar himself has suggested he’s no people person. But his immediate problem is that voters don’t seem willing to cut him any slack on domestic issues. A visible rise in homelessness in Dublin, hospital waiting times and, in the case of the demonstrating farmers, stagnant agricultural prices all loom large over the campaign.