Politics after Donaldson: The old political order in Northern Ireland is breaking down

Jeffrey Donaldson's conviction has set off a political earthquake in Northern Ireland, leaving every major party facing uncomfortable questions before next year's elections.

NORTHERN IRELAND IS on track for one of its most volatile and unpredictable elections; Unionist parties are in free fall, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) ranks are depleted, and the Alliance Party is on the defensive.

The fallout from former party leader Jeffrey Donaldson's criminal conviction continues, but the DUP are far from the only party ill-prepared for a double election. After decades of political stagnation, could Northern Ireland's political landscape dramatically change next May?

The DUP has had two years to prepare for the potential damage that a guilty verdict for Donaldson would bring, and yet the two weeks since his conviction have demonstrated that for all its efforts to create distance, the party is unable to disassociate itself from Donaldson's decades of lies and hypocrisy.

There is no suggestion that the party was aware of the heinous crimes Donaldson was convicted of, which include the rape of a child. What is clear is that senior leaders were acutely aware that the pious image of the man they pinned their mast to was a lie.

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Hardly a day has passed without a new revelation; a BBC Spotlight special featured former senior party representatives exposing a pattern of drunken behaviour and reports of inappropriate sexual incidents against women, including an unnamed MLA.

Subsequent reporting from the Belfast Telegraph suggests the party was well aware that Donaldson was problematic, with suggestions that Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly had warned a woman that Donaldson posed a "danger" to her - Pengelly denies the report.

Last week, Assembly Speaker Edwin Poots faced intense pressure to step aside as the focus moved forcefully toward understanding who knew what when. The party has announced that it will commission an independent review, to be headed up by Jim Gamble, former head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre.

This move may not satisfy public expectations for transparency. As for Donaldson, his sentence will be handed down in September, months closer to the Local and Assembly elections.

A shifting NI political landscape

The DUP will be going to the polls at its weakest since overtaking the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in the 2003 election, but the UUP is hardly in a position to capitalise on the DUP's position.

In May, former party leader Doug Beattie resigned from the UUP, citing a "toxic atmosphere" under the leadership of Jon Burrows. Burrows was co-opted into the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2025 and became party leader within six months despite never standing for election.

His tenure has been marred by party infighting with suggestions that other MLAs, including Alan Chambers and Robbie Butler, could be iced out or may step aside by the end of the current mandate, which would represent a further purge of the party's moderate wing.

Jim Allister MP will no doubt see an opportunity for the Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) to edge in, but with only one MLA in the party, and a predilection toward unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and far-right rhetoric, the party is not a serious contender for seats, though it will affect the DUP and UUP's vote share. All of which suggests unionism is on course for a disastrous election following what has already been a decade of decline since the 2016 Brexit referendum.

The DUP fought the last Assembly election on its raison d'être - keeping "themmuns" out with then-party leader Donaldson refusing to accept that he would serve under a Sinn Féin First Minister during the campaign, despite the office of First Minister and Deputy First Minister being entirely equivalent in all but name.

The Sinn Féin vote

In the end, Sinn Féin's ascension to the title of First Minister had little effect on Northern Irish politics or the lives of the electorate, nullifying one in a number of scare tactics in the DUP's arsenal. In contrast, Sinn Féin is well prepared for next year's election; the party has already announced several of its candidates and is ahead in the polls despite repeated failures to deliver on its manifesto promises. The 2027 election is Sinn Féin's to lose.

One might expect Alliance to be the natural beneficiary of a split in the unionist vote share, but the conditions that led to the party's historic success in 2022 will be hard to replicate; not only has Stormont been in operation, but Alliance has actively been in government, making it decidedly more difficult to portray itself as a party of change.

It will be defending several marginal seats; North Antrim, won by just 288 votes, a second seat in Strangford with a margin of 249 votes, and deputy leader Eoin Tennyson's lead of just 376 votes. The SDLP will also be on the defensive after losing four of its 12 seats in 2022. The party's longest serving MLA Patsy McGlone, has confirmed that he will not contest the next election, while several other representatives remain highly vulnerable.

How all of this plays out when voters go to the polls remains to be seen; prior to the Donaldson verdict, the most recent polling from Lucidtalk placed Sinn Féin at 24%, the DUP at 18%, the UUP at 13% and Alliance, SDLP and the TUV all at 11%.

With a recently convicted child rapist and paedophile having once served as the leader of a political party that, for decades, remained the largest party in Northern Ireland, we are entering uncharted territory; The election could either culminate in historically low levels of turnout as the public becomes increasingly fatigued with a political system that fails to deliver, or a very different Assembly with a strengthened Sinn Féin team could emerge, the outcome of which would have wider implications of the future of this island as a whole.

Emma DeSouza is a writer and campaigner. 

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