Stop Boris. Stop Brexit. These are the words that underline the election posters of candidates for the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). With 15 candidates, two of who appear to have a chance of winning a seat, running in Northern Ireland, whose 18 seats account for 2.77 per cent of the Westminster Parliament’s 650, it is hard to see how even the most optimistic of forecasts could show a way for the SDLP or any other Northern party to stop either Boris or Brexit.

What the SDLP are doing, much like the Alliance Party, and to a lesser extent Sinn Féin and the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), is attempting to frame the general election in Northern Ireland, much like many in Britain have, as the ‘Brexit Election’. The SDLP and Alliance have made no qualms about outlining their plans to do everything in their power to stop Brexit if elected, the UUP have said they are opposed to Boris Johnson’s deal but not in favour of halting the process altogether, while Sinn Féin’s position is to leave the British to their Brexit, which they say would be a “disaster” for Ireland. 

It is Sinn Féin’s position that is the most illustrative of the real dynamic at play here: rather than being the Brexit election, this campaign has largely been more of the same, but coloured slightly differently by Brexit. This is not the election where the North “breaks the cycle” of orange and green – unionist and republican – politics that the Alliance predict and plead for with every election. This is the election where both mainstream unionism and republicanism begin their endgames.

The Good Friday Agreement enshrined this moment into inevitability when it was signed in 1998. Along with the good it did in ending 30 years of war, the Agreement’s most famous provision – that a border poll on Irish unity would be held when it was unavoidable – turned Northern politics into even more of a zero sum game. The border poll provision turned post-GFA politics into a race to and away from Irish unity for republicanism and unionism respectively. It could be argued that this had always been the crux of Northern politics, but the difference was that there was now an end goal in sight. This was clear to the electorate, who from the 2003 Assembly elections onwards began to desert the moderate SDLP and UUP for the hardliners Sinn Féin and the anti-Agreement DUP.

For Sinn Féin, Brexit is the ultimate opportunity to get the project of Irish reunification over the line. Buoyed by forecasted demographic change that will see a Catholic majority in the North for the first time during the 2020s, Sinn Féin have tried to capitalise on middle class unionist dissatisfaction with the DUP’s support for Brexit by making the case that a united Ireland is the only way for the North’s six counties to remain in the EU. In doing so, Sinn Féin have dropped their pre-2016 Euroscepticism and embraced the narrative of the EU as the great liberal unity project.

How the party reconciles its anti-austerity positions in Ireland’s south, where Fine Gael gleefully implemented EU-mandated austerity, while singing the EU’s virtues in the North remains a contradiction yet to be solved. Sinn Féin have been more than happy to go along with suggestions of a Remain alliance; when they stepped aside in East Belfast, South Belfast and North Down, they urged voters to vote tactically for Remain parties. The reality is that Sinn Féin know that they have less than no chance of winning in those constituencies. In North Down, they backed the incumbent independent unionist Sylvia Hermon, the jingoistic lover of fox hunting and mass surveillance. Hermon later announced her decision not to run and the seat will most likely go to the DUP.

What possibly hamstrings Sinn Féin from furthering their pre-Brexit anti-EU rhetoric is the reality that, for their base to the west of the River Bann in counties Derry, Tyrone and Fermanagh, the EU has had a positive material impact. This is only because the west of the Bann was so cartoonishly deprived economically by the unionist dominated pre-Troubles state that any investment at all would have appeared to be a godsend. With infrastructure as simple as roads built by EU funding in the post-GFA era, it is easy to understand why some people in areas such a Derry city, Strabane and Magherafelt might look on the EU more favourably than those across the border in Donegal who still live with the damage wrought by the Troika. Still, in the largely republican Foyle constituency of Derry City, the dynamic will be the same as it has been since Sinn Féin reorganised electorally in the 1980s: Sinn Féin versus the SDLP, green versus light green.

In the last general election, Sinn Féin won the Foyle seat for the first time, capitalising on an almost 13 percentage point upturn in turnout for Elisha McCallion to defeat Mark Durkan. Had the party learned from that turnout uptick and focused on the working-class and unemployed of Derry city, where the employment rate is just 61.6 per cent, McCallion would be a certainty to retain her seat. Instead their attempts to woo the middle-class with their anti-Brexit campaigning has left her neck and neck with SDLP leader Colum Eastwood and has brought the contest back to a question that has defined electoral races in Foyle long before Brexit: do the people want an abstentionist MP who rejects Britain’s presence in Ireland, or do they want one who accepts it and will go to Westminster accordingly?

What is missing from Sinn Féin’s attempt to secure some of the middle-class unionists they also covet is the reality that, given their material comfort that will remain largely untouched by any Brexit outcome, these unionists get to decide whether they are unionist or middle-class first. In North Belfast, they have chosen the former. When Sinn Féin announced the candidacy of John Finucane, Lord Mayor of Belfast and son of Pat Finucane, the solicitor murdered by the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) in collusion with MI5, as a challenger to Nigel Dodds, the DUP’s leader in Westminster, other unionist parties had a choice to make. The UUP were preparing to run a candidate in North Belfast on an anti-Brexit platform, but as soon as Finucane’s candidacy was announced, the pressure was turned up. Under threat from the still-active UDA, the UUP agreed to step aside. The heavy hitters of unionism had stepped in to make sure the message was clear: North Belfast’s election was not about Brexit, it was once again to be a straight race of orange versus green.

The inverse is happening in Fermanagh and South Tyrone, where the DUP, despite their support for as hard a Brexit as possible in order to flout the GFA and ensure reunification is made an impossibility, have withdrawn from the race to support the anti-“bad Brexit deal” UUP candidate, Tom Elliot’s bid to displace Sinn Féin MP Michelle Gildernew. For unionism, this is no Brexit election; this is the election that will define what is going to be the most turbulent decade in the North’s short history. The seemingly unstoppable momentum of the border poll campaign means that ideological differences have been parked in order to allow republicanism as few elected representatives as possible. Even the Alliance, whose roots are in the unionist New Ulster Movement but who portray themselves as being above the push and pull of unionism versus republicanism, have been subject to posters accusing them of being a front for the IRA. 

In the month leading up to the election, the DUP released its 12-point plan “to get Northern Ireland moving again.” Featuring the word “again” in its title and seven times across the 12 points, it was a clear drawing of the battle lines. Sinn Féin collapsed the Assembly, the North’s devolved government, in January of 2017 and have refused to go back ever since due to being tired of how Northern Ireland functioned. While there has been plenty of pressure from outside to return to the institutions, there has been none of note from Sinn Féin’s base, proving that the everyday republican was also tired and desires no “again” in the context of Northern Ireland as a state.

What Brexit has done is create the muddle that liberals so desire: the idea that class politics and, in the context of the North, ethno-national politics, can be transcended to create new liberal movements. Sinn Féin would do well to remember that their emergence as the largest republican party in the North was due to their mobilisation of the working-class in cities such as Belfast and Derry and provincial towns such as Omagh and Magherafelt. Orange versus green politics can’t be circumvented because the Good Friday Agreement has guaranteed their dominance until the day Ireland is reunited by border poll, but for Sinn Féin the challenge is to remain the largest party of the green and they have attempted to do so by playing the wrong kind of class politics.

Instead of seeking to advance the case that both political unionism and the EU materially deprive those they deem to be not their kind, they have instead opted to praise the EU as a way of exposing unionist close-mindedness. A return to the maxim of the revolutionary socialist James Connolly, that the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour and vice versa, would create a much higher vote ceiling for Sinn Féin than their doomed attempts at courting a Remain alliance vote full of people who will never vote Sinn Féin due to their past radicalism. Such a move would position the party to challenge the austere hegemony passed from Brussels to Dublin in the event of a successful border poll. 

LucidTalk polling in October found that 1 per cent each of people who consider themselves strongly or slightly unionist plan on voting Sinn Féin this month. Were this actually the Brexit election, surely these numbers would be higher given that 41 per cent of unionists were said to be opposed to Brexit in more LucidTalk polling. There are bridges that will not be crossed and the completely benign numbers of unionists who cast a vote for Sinn Féin will only fall as the inevitable border poll comes closer. 

This being another election of orange versus green makes the argument easy for Sinn Féin: 18 seats in a parliament of 650 and a currently non-functioning devolved government that cuts off Down from Louth, Derry from Donegal and Fermanagh from Cavan could never possibly address the needs of the North, in or out of the EU. With climate disaster fast approaching, the time for unity on a tiny island with two separate climate policies grows ever more urgent. As they chase media and middle-class approval north and south of the border, with an eye on entering the Dáil in Dublin as the junior partner in a coalition government, Sinn Féin should realise that those most strongly opposed to Brexit will never warm to them just as they will never warm to Jeremy Corbyn, regardless of his position.

It falls to republicans to argue that the circumvention of orange versus green comes after unification, where the socialist republic that Connolly and his comrades dreamed of allays the fears of unionists through material equity. It is through the resolving of the Irish national question decisively in favour of the cause of labour and the cause of Ireland, not electoral pacts with the SDLP and Sylvia Hermon, that we will see the end of orange versus green.