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LONDON — From the start, Irish voters were less beguiled than the rest of the world by the novelty of having a young, openly gay, half-Indian man lead their government. Now, as they go to the polls on Saturday, these voters are poised to turn their trail-blazing prime minister, Leo Varadkar, out of power.
As was the case when Mr. Varadkar rose to be prime minister, or taoiseach, in June 2017, his declining political fortunes have had relatively little to do with his ethnicity or sexual identity. He leads a party, Fine Gael, that has been in power since 2011, and with voters frustrated over Ireland’s housing crisis, Mr. Varadkar, 41, is facing every politician’s curse of being a status quo figure in a change election.
That has outweighed the credit he got for his sure-footed performance in negotiating with Prime Minister Boris Johnson over the status of Northern Ireland after Brexit. Mr. Varadkar was able to extract a deal that avoided a hard border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland by aligning the north with the European Union more closely than the rest of the United Kingdom.
Brexit, however, has faded quickly as an issue in Ireland, giving way to concerns about the housing shortage, rising rents and growing homelessness. For all his success as a diplomat, voters fault Mr. Varadkar for failing to confront these and other domestic problems, like the cost of health care.
“Leo Varadkar is facing a governing penalty,” said Theresa Reidy, a political scientist at University College Cork. “There was wide support for the government’s handling of Brexit. But when it comes to evaluating parties in an election, there are other issues crowding the table.”
The hunger for change is scrambling Irish politics, polls show. The Irish nationalist party, Sinn Fein, unexpectedly vaulted ahead of the two mainstream parties, with 25 percent of the vote, compared with 23 percent for the opposition Fianna Fail and 20 percent for Fine Gael, in a poll released Monday by the Irish Times.
Though Sinn Fein is historically identified by its links to the Irish Republican Army — a legacy it has never been able to shake with older Irish people — it has appealed to younger urban voters with robust policies to deal with the housing crisis, among them a pledge to build 100,000 homes in five years.
For these young Irish, the I.R.A.’s role in the sectarian violence of the Troubles is a distant memory. Their inability to find or afford a decent apartment, even with a well-paying job, is an ever-present daily reality.
While analysts say Sinn Fein is a long-shot to form a government — it is fielding too few candidates, they say, and the other two parties refuse to accept it as a coalition partner — it could emerge as the country’s leading opposition party. Even that would change the nature of Irish politics, since Sinn Fein is committed to holding a referendum on Irish unification within five years.
“Their raison d’être is Irish unification,” said Bobby McDonagh, a former Irish ambassador to Britain. “But Sinn Fein’s rise in the polls is largely the result of its left-leaning, populist approach to problems.”
Mr. McDonagh noted that Fine Gael and Ireland’s other mainstream party, Fianna Fail, are both more cautious about the timetable for uniting north and south, given the economic disparity between the two and the substantial population in Northern Ireland that favors remaining part of the United Kingdom. Still, in the aftermath of Brexit, analysts predict that sentiment in the north could also shift in favor of a referendum.
In Britain’s general election in December, the territory elected more nationalist members of Parliament, who support reunification with the Republic of Ireland, than unionists, who wish to remain a part of the United Kingdom. It was the first time it had done so in its history.
Irish unification is still over the horizon, however, while Ireland’s housing crunch commands daily headlines. The lack of housing is a hangover of the 2008 economic crisis, when construction ceased. Ireland’s economy bounced back quickly, but the Fine Gael government did not restart construction quickly enough, leading to an acute shortage, particularly in cities like Dublin.
Mr. Varadkar has tried to respond to the problem, promoting the fact that Ireland built 20,000 homes in the past year. But analysts said it was probably too late to save his party. And his plea for voters to focus on other issues, including his deft handling of Brexit, has largely fallen on deaf ears.
Part of the problem is his personality, which many find aloof and distant in a land that prizes the opposite. A physician who is the son of an Indian doctor and a Catholic Irish nurse, Mr. Varadkar is tall and trim, with a penchant for clipped sentences. In a recent debate, he conceded that, unlike the leader of Fianna Fail, Micheal Martin, he has been accused at times of lacking empathy.
“I know people say that about my party and about me, but I care deeply about our country and the problems we face,” he said. “I maybe can’t put it into words as good as my opponent does, but I do it in action.”
Mr. Varadkar’s cool, disciplined manner did not prevent him from becoming the youngest taoiseach in Irish history, at the age of 38. And it stood him in good stead during the anxious Brexit negotiations last fall, when he was a stark contrast to the discursive Mr. Johnson.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Varadkar has tried to soften his image by posing with babies and farm animals. But he is handicapped by having to run against Mr. Martin, who analysts describe as a gifted retail politician who loves nothing more than chatting with voters on their doorsteps.
“He didn’t connect with ordinary voters in a way that, in this particular campaign, he needed to,” said Pat Leahy, the political editor of The Irish Times. “Especially because his government was being criticized for being out of touch.”
For much of the world, Mr. Varadkar is a symbol of Ireland’s leap from its clannish, Catholic past to a tolerant, multiracial modernity. On a visit to Washington in 2019, he brought his partner, Matt Barrett, to meet Vice President Mike Pence and pointedly reminded his host that, growing up, he “lived in a country where if I’d tried to be myself at the time, it would have ended up breaking laws.”
In the secular Ireland of 2020, however, many view Mr. Varadkar less as a symbol of progress than of privilege. “For a lot of Irish people,” Ms. Reidy said, “he was just Leo Varadkar of Dublin.”
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