Ireland’s far-right candidates failed to win a single seat in the country’s general election and are now echoing the Trumpian cry to “stop the steal”.
“Does anyone believe this is possible?” Philip Dwyer, one of the most prominent far-right candidates, wrote in X after receiving just one vote from one polling place in Friday’s voting. “There is definitely no election interference here… Is RTE directly telling us that the game is rigged?”
Dwyer, who did not respond to a request for comment, received only 435 votes out of 57,000 people who voted. The single vote came from a polling station in Newtownmountkennedy, the scene of violent anti-immigrant protests in recent months that Dwyer himself documented in detail for his large following on social media.
Ireland’s election results, which are likely to see the current government returned to power, contradict this year’s global trend of populist and far-right parties and leaders making significant gains in Europe and the United States.
Other far-right candidates echoed Dwyer’s claims of voter fraud. Derek Blighe, leader of the far-right Ireland First party, claimed in X without evidence that voters were not being asked for identification and that ballot papers, which must be separated from their matrix in the presence of voters, were being torn. before the voters arrived.
He also expanded on the claim that a voter in Cork was able to vote twice after receiving two election cards. “I wonder how much of this happened across the country.” Blighe wrote in X.
When asked about these claims, Blighe called this reporter a “pro-government asshole.”
The term “rigged” was trending on X in the days after the election as votes were counted. “Substantial evidence has emerged of election fraud that prevented right-wing candidates and parties from winning,” an Ireland-focused conspiracy account with 160,000 followers wrote on X on Monday, without providing any of the “substantial evidence” they mentioned.
Prominent American far-right figures have sought to influence Ireland’s growing far-right movement over the past 12 months, and one day before the election, centibillionaire Elon Musk shared a post on X by a prominent far-right figure in Ireland, with the comment: “The people of Ireland will vote for freedom.”