BELFAST — Rishi Sunak has achieved his Brexit breakthrough. But like so many British prime ministers before him, he still needs approval from the immovable object of Northern Ireland politics — the Democratic Unionist Party — for his deal to become a genuine triumph.
The DUP’s track record, through decades of war and peace, suggests Sunak could be waiting some time.
DUP officials told POLITICO it could be weeks, perhaps even months, before the PM receives a final verdict on his deal from a party with a long and proud history of ruining others’ finely balanced compromises.
Downing Street made clear Tuesday that the Windsor Framework, the U.K.-EU deal to make post-Brexit trade rules work better for Northern Ireland, can proceed into British law regardless of the DUP’s support. “The framework is what we have agreed with the European Union,” Sunak told the BBC. “This is not necessarily about me, or any one political party.”
But delivery of the deal’s core political objective — to restore Northern Ireland’s cross-community government, in line with the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998 — remains within the DUP’s gift. The rules of power-sharing at Stormont don’t allow any government to operate without the main unionist party.
A DUP official close to leader Jeffrey Donaldson said that, while no official decisions have been taken, the party is unlikely to adopt any formal position on the deal before Northern Ireland’s local council elections on May 18 — and even, potentially, an as-yet-unscheduled Northern Ireland Assembly election to follow.
“We’ve forced the [British] government and the EU to concede we’ve been right all along in opposing the protocol,” said the official, who spoke on the condition that he wasn’t identified because party colleagues have asked him to ignore requests for comment. “That doesn’t mean we must bow to their pressure to accept the partial fix on offer.”
Sunak’s deal has been warmly welcomed elsewhere, including by the opposition Labour Party in Westminster and by several previously skeptical Tory Brexiteers. U.S. President Joe Biden called the Windsor Framework an “essential step” to ensuring peace in Northern Ireland is preserved.
But the prospect of diplomatic isolation holds no fear for the DUP.
The party resisted years of condemnation and even ridicule after rejecting the Good Friday peace accord a quarter-century ago, an agreement backed by the British and Irish governments and every other major political party in Northern Ireland. That rejection paid electoral dividends. Going it alone, the DUP surged in popularity on the British Protestant side of the community precisely because the party knew how to say “no” and mean it.
It took nearly a decade before the DUP finally shifted its stance in favor of compromise and power-sharing with the Irish republicans of Sinn Féin. It did so only after the Irish Republican Army surrendered its arsenal and Sinn Féin formally accepted police authority — core unionist conditions that the 1998 deal had failed to nail down.
Furthermore, the DUP accepted Good Friday’s power-sharing blueprint only after tweaking it in a successor deal, the St Andrew’s Agreement of 2006. That maneuver allowed the DUP to claim it really wasn’t accepting the original deal at all, but had “fixed” it through tough negotiation.
‘We’re always proved right’
That DUP impulse to stand its ground and refuse to buckle until the other side gives way still anchors the party grassroots today.
“People love to gang up on us and say we’re wrong, wrong, wrong,” another DUP party officer told POLITICO, also speaking on condition of anonymity. “Fast-forward a few years, and we’re always proved right.”
He added: “It’s happened again, despite all the ‘expert’ predictions otherwise. The Windsor Framework shows we were right to resist the protocol. We can confidently campaign on that, even if we don’t accept it as sufficient.”
While the DUP could yet use the Windsor Framework to perform a pivot on the protocol similar to the St Andrew’s revisitation of the Good Friday Agreement, its rank-and-file members have repeatedly demonstrated that any leader who embraces change too quickly risks being removed from office.
That fate befell even the most seemingly invincible DUP leader, party founder Ian Paisley, who shocked the world with his sudden acceptance of Sinn Féin in 2007. He was ousted within a year by party rebels rattled by his chummy relations with former IRA chieftain Martin McGuinness, his government co-leader.
If Donaldson does eventually accept the Windsor Framework, he will do so only when he can take the majority of senior party figures with him. That process is expected to involve extensive consultations with legal advisers and a series of behind-closed-doors meetings with the party’s eight MPs and 25 MLAs (members of the legislative assembly), starting this weekend.
“We have undoubtedly achieved major movement in defense of Northern Ireland’s place in the union [with Britain], but we’re not there yet,” the same DUP official warned. “There’s still ambiguities in what’s on offer. We’ll be in no rush to say yes. We’ll move when the time is right.”
Seven tests
Donaldson’s position within his party is not wholly secure. In some corners, he is still viewed as an Ulster Unionist “blow-in,” an opportunist who defected from the more moderate unionist party two decades ago. He was the DUP’s second choice for leader in June 2021 following the ouster of Arlene Foster, taking control only after Edwin Poots self-destructed, Liz Truss-style, within days of assuming power.
To address any perception of weakness, Donaldson made a list of demands for “replacing” the post-Brexit trade protocol one of his first major acts as leader.
But the so-called “seven tests” for accepting any successor agreement to the protocol do contain wiggle room for rival interpretations as to whether the Windsor Framework meets most, if not all, of the seven demands.
Within Donaldson’s close circle, according to both party officials quoted in this article, the current assessment is that the Windsor Framework at least partially addresses all seven tests — but properly fulfills, at most, only four of them.
“We could go to the voters contending that the Windsor Framework meets most of our tests,” said the first party official. “Not all seven.”
Winning elections remains the DUP’s biggest immediate focus, with 11 councils across Northern Ireland up for grabs on May 18. The DUP remains ahead in these local authorities, with 122 seats to Sinn Féin’s 105 following the 2019 vote.
But the DUP has already lost pole position in the mothballed Stormont assembly. The May 2022 elections produced a Sinn Féin breakthrough, aided by unionist divisions over the DUP’s backfiring support for Boris Johnson’s “oven-ready” Brexit deal, which included the protocol.
Sinn Féin’s regional leader, outgoing Deputy First Minister Michelle O’Neill, would take the first minister’s post for the first time, rather than the DUP, if Donaldson permits the assembly to elect a new multi-party administration.
DUP tacticians believe they might regain lost ground to Sinn Féin in a Stormont election re-run — but only if they can campaign on a convincing platform that they’ve replaced the original protocol treaty. Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris has just gained new legislative powers to call such a vote anytime between now and January 2024.
Loose cannons
Loose cannons in DUP ranks, most prominently MPs Sammy Wilson and Ian Paisley Jr., have already announced they don’t think the Windsor Framework will be a winner on the campaign trail. Such freelancing wasn’t tolerated through the decades when Paisley Sr. ran the party, but became commonplace after Foster, like Donaldson an Ulster Unionist defector, took the DUP reins in late 2015.
“Nobody can shut up Ian or Sammy. They talk like they set policy. They’d certainly like people to think they do. They don’t set policy,” the second party official said.
For all Donaldson’s internal party challenges, his room for accepting the new Brexit package on offer may be limited most by the risk that by compromising, he could be overrun by a hardline competitor.
That rival takes the form of Jim Allister, a former DUP member of the European Parliament who spent much of his time in Brussels denouncing the EU. Allister couldn’t stomach Paisley’s 2007 burying of the hatchet with Sinn Féin and forged a new one-man party, Traditional Unionist Voice, which still treats Sinn Féin as political untouchables.
In the May 2022 election, Allister’s TUV for the first time ran a candidate in each of Northern Ireland’s 18 assembly constituencies on a platform condemning the DUP’s initial defense of the protocol. They attracted more than 65,000 votes, 7.6 percent of the total — almost exactly the DUP’s newfound shortfall versus Sinn Féin.
Allister was quick out of the blocks Monday to dismiss the Windsor Framework as a con job designed to fool the DUP into putting “apologists for terror back into the heart of our government.”
The first DUP party officer quoted above said the TUV couldn’t be allowed to eat into the party’s support base like that again. That could mean maintaining a hard anti-EU element to the DUP’s platform — and staying out of Stormont until the far side of an ill-defined election cycle.
“We’d be foolish to allow Jim Allister to hand another win to the Shinners,” said the official, using common slang for Sinn Féin. “Jim, with his usual charm, will argue that if we accept the Windsor Framework, we’re still the same old suckers who accepted the protocol and keep enabling Sinn Féin. It’s a handicap that we don’t have to accept ahead of an election — and probably won’t.”
