Dublin, June 14 (EFE).- The final count of the European elections held in Ireland confirmed on Friday the victory of the two main parties, the Christian-democrat Fine Gael and the centrist Fianna Fáil, after each obtaining four of the 14 seats the country has in the European Parliament.
Both parties, partners with the Greens in the national government, resisted the push of the leftist Sinn Féin, the main opposition party, which won two MEPs in the June 7 polls.
Despite gaining one more seat compared to 2019, Sinn Féin aspired to win the European and local elections, also held last Friday, since the party led the polls during the last three years, in which it gathered more than 30 percent voter support.
In this event, Fine Gael (integrated into the European People’s Party) and Fianna Fáil (member of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe) each obtained 20 percent of first preference votes, followed by 11 percent for Sinn Féin and 34 percent for the independent bloc, which won three seats, while the last seat went to the Labour Party.
Unlike the local and European elections five years ago, the independent bloc included on this occasion, for the first time, candidates and minority far-right formations, which brought the issue of immigration to the center of the campaign.
The independents also reached close to 30 percent support in the local elections, in which they obtained 227 of the 949 representatives at stake, which allowed the entry into the administrations of a handful of extreme right-wing voices.
On the contrary, only one extremist candidate was left at the doors of the European Parliament, according to the vote count, which lasted for almost six days due to the complex Irish proportional representation electoral system with vote transfer.
The transfer of votes between candidates benefited Fiana Fáil and Fine Gael of Prime Minister Simon Harris, who obtained 22.95 percent and 22.99 percent of the votes in the local elections, and were awarded 248 and 245 representatives respectively, while Sinn Féin reached 102 with 11.79 percent first preference. EFE
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