Ireland Rejected the Far Right. The Election Conspiracy Theories Have Already Begun

Ireland’s far-right candidates failed to win a single seat in the country’s general election and are now echoing the Trumpian cry of “stop the steal.”

“Does anyone think this is possible?” Philip Dwyer, one of the most high-profile far-right candidates, wrote on X after he received just a single vote from one polling location in Friday’s vote. “Definitely no election interference going on here … are RTE actually straight out telling us the game is rigged?”

Dwyer, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, received just 435 votes out of 57,000 people who voted. The single vote came from a polling location in Newtownmountkennedy, the scene of violent anti-immigrant protests in recent months that Dwyer himself documented in detail for his large social media following.

Ireland’s election results, which will likely see the incumbent government returned to power, bucks the global trend this year of far-right and populist parties and leaders making significant gains in Europe and the US.

Other far-right candidates echoed Dwyer’s claims of election fraud. Derek Blighe, the leader of the far-right Ireland First party, claimed on X without evidence that voters were not being asked for ID and that ballot papers, which are meant to be separated from their counterfoil in the presence of voters, were being torn out before voters arrived.

He also amplified a claim that one voter in Cork was able to vote twice after receiving two polling cards. “I wonder how much of this happened around the country?” Blighe wrote on X.

When asked about these claims, Blighe called this WIRED reporter a “pro-government arsehole.”

The term “rigged” was trending on X in the days after the election as votes were being counted. “Substantial evidence has emerged of Voter Fraud which prevented right-wing candidates and Parties from winning,” one Irish-focused conspiracy account with 160,000 followers wrote on X on Monday, without providing any of the “substantial evidence” they mentioned.

Prominent figures in the US far-right have sought to influence Ireland’s growing far-right movement over the past 12 months, and a day before the election, centibillionaire Elon Musk shared a post on X from a prominent far-right figure in Ireland, with the comment: “The people of Ireland will vote for freedom.”