Northern Ireland began voting Thursday in snap elections to resolve a political crisis fuelled by bad blood and Brexit, which is testing the delicate peace in the British province. Long-simmering tensions boiled over in January when the Sinn Fein party - once the political arm of the Irish Republican Army - brought down the province''s semi-autonomous government.
That triggered fresh elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly, a legislature in Belfast in which representatives of once warring communities have shared power on and off since a 1998 peace deal. Observers predict a similar outcome to the May 2016 elections, in which the conservative and pro-British Democratic Unionist Party won slightly more seats than the socialist and pro-Irish republican Sinn Fein.
If the two parties cannot resolve their differences within three weeks of the vote, the assembly''s executive could be suspended and the province fully governed from London. "I''d be more pessimistic than optimistic that the DUP and Sinn Fein can get back in a government together quickly," Jonathan Tonge, a Northern Ireland politics expert at Liverpool University, told AFP.
Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander who became the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, resigned in January in protest over a botched green energy subsidy scheme. It had been instigated by First Minister Arlene Foster, head of the DUP, when she was economy minister. Deeply engrained historical enmity was also exacerbated by the June vote for Britain to leave the European Union, which the DUP supported but Sinn Fein opposed.