LONDON/BELFAST (Reuters) – The British government will call a snap election for the Stormont, Northern Ireland Assembly, to break the British province’s political stalemate.
“Elections will take place,” Thérèse Coffey, Secretary of State for the Environment, told the BBC.
Without a government since February, when the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) pulled out of the power-sharing government in protest at certain post-Brexit provisions, Northern Ireland gave the party victory for the first time nationalist Sinn Fein in the regional parliamentary elections in May.
The victory in May of Sinn Fein, the former political branch of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), did not, however, bring the province out of the political deadlock and London says it is legally obliged to call new elections after the deadline for 24 weeks to form a government expired on Thursday.
Chris Heaton-Harris, minister responsible for Northern Ireland in the UK government, has yet to officially announce the election, which would take place within 12 weeks.
Northern Ireland media have reported December 15 as the most likely date for a return to the polls.
Calling an election means caretaker ministers lose their power and London runs the affairs of the province (“direct rule”), and a prolonged deadlock would likely lead to more decisions being made in London.
A new election is also likely to highlight deep political divisions over Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit protocol.
Under the Northern Ireland protocol, the province continues to de facto belong to the European single market and customs union in order to preserve the free movement of goods with the neighboring Republic of Ireland and the 1998 peace agreement which ended three decades of violence in Northern Ireland.
Unionists refuse to drop his boycott of the power-sharing system put in place since the peace deal until his concerns about post-Brexit trade deals are addressed.
Brussels has said it is open to the relaxation of certain provisions, while defending that trade controls between Great Britain and Northern Ireland are necessary to protect its single market following Brexit.
(Reporting Kylie MacLellan and Amanda Ferguson; writing by Conor Humprhies and Muvija M, French version Diana Mandiá, editing by Kate Entringer)