China's best friends in European Parliament fighting for political lives back home in Ireland

What have Hollywood superstar Susan Sarandon and the Chinese Communist Party got in common?

The chances are, they are both rooting for two Irish politicians, Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, to be re-elected to the European Parliament this week.

In a video that went viral last week, the Oscar-winning actress pointed to the two lawmakers' vocal support for Gaza, contrasting them with her own country, the United States, which is "in a very pro-war time".

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"There are very few voices for peace in places of power and we need them more than ever now, especially with what's going on in Gaza," Sarandon said, in a video that has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

"So, I beg of you this June, don't forget to give your number one vote to Claire Daly in Dublin or to Mick Wallace in Ireland South."

The pair have become Ireland's most recognisable political figures outside the country thanks to Wallace's distinctive pink shirts and straggly grey hair combined with Daly's ferocious polemics against American hegemony and European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, who has become Beijing's bete noire in Brussels.

Their huge followings on X, formerly Twitter, (376,411 at the time of writing for Wallace and 422,776 for Daly) dwarf more mainstream Irish politicians - the current Taoiseach, or prime minister, Simon Harris has 248,559 followers - while their videos on TikTok have racked millions of views.

Susan Sarandon urged voters in Ireland to support the pair in the European Parliament elections this week. Photo: EPA-EFE alt=Susan Sarandon urged voters in Ireland to support the pair in the European Parliament elections this week. Photo: EPA-EFE>

But both Daly and Wallace face a huge challenge in being re-elected for a second term in the parliament, with polls set to open on June 6.

In a recent poll by the Irish Times, the country's newspaper of record, Wallace was running at 3 per cent of the vote in his district, with Daly fairing slightly better on 6 per cent.

Under the single transferable vote system used in Ireland this gives her a chance of picking up enough transfers from eliminated candidates, but nonetheless she is fighting for her political life.

"I would write Mick off, but Clare still has an outside chance of getting back in," said Jane Suiter, a political scientist at Dublin City University.

The pair's support for Gaza is popular among voters in Ireland, considered to be Europe's most pro-Palestinian state, but Daly and Wallace's dalliances with states such as China, Syria and Russia, may help explain their slip in the polls, Suiter said.

Daly and Wallace were outspoken in defence of Russia before its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Wallace described the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine that resulted in the ousting of pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich as a "US-orchestrated coup", according to the Irish Times, and attempted to erase the European Parliament's condemnation of Moscow's "illegal annexation of Crimea".

They have since tried to distance themselves from Tatjana ­Zdanoka, a Latvian MEP with whom they made several joint appearances, after she was placed under investigation on suspicion of spying for Russia.

Neither Daly nor Wallace agreed to be interviewed for this story, but on a recent appearance with the I4C Trouble podcast, Daly said of Zdanoka: "We're not linked with anybody except ourselves; we're independent, we love our independence."

Mick Wallace and Clare Daly ewere interviewed by Li Jingjing, a journalist for the Chinese state TV channel CGTN, in Beijing. Photo: X /Li Jingjing alt=Mick Wallace and Clare Daly ewere interviewed by Li Jingjing, a journalist for the Chinese state TV channel CGTN, in Beijing. Photo: X /Li Jingjing>

The duo have lobbied for the EU to remove sanctions against Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria, and been censured for visiting an Iranian-backed militia headquarters in Iraq, which led to them being described as "an embarrassment to Ireland" by Malcolm Byrne, an Irish senator.

Suiter said that "what started out as knee jerk anti-Americanism" has begun to cause concern in Ireland about the sort of company their elected representatives are keeping and prompted greater media scrutiny.

Since being elected in 2019, the colourful pair have also become firmly established as the most pro-China members of the European Parliament.

An analysis of voting records from 2019 by the Czech Association of Foreign Affairs last week found that their party within the Left Group, Independents4Change (of which they are the only two members), voted against China-critical resolutions 86 per cent of the time.

The only instance of Wallace voting in favour of such a resolution over the five years was a surprise "yes" to a motion criticising the detention of Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai Chee-ying - which the Wexford man later amended to an abstention.

The duo travelled to China last year, in a trip that was given favourable coverage on state media channels.

In Xian, Wallace, a former property developer who built wine bars across Dublin, got his first tattoo: black Chinese characters across his wrist that translate into English as "no war", images of which were shared by senior Chinese diplomats on social media.

The stance has left the members alienated from many in their parliamentary group.

Multiple sources within the Left Group said neither Daly nor Wallace were guaranteed to be accepted back into the fold if, as now appears unlikely, they both secure re-election.

"Very few people [in the group] believe a word they say about China," said one staffer, who said their trip to China was a trigger for other lawmakers to try to curtail their speaking time on the topic.

"We were looking at this thinking: you cannot be serious. People now fear what they are going to say on China. Many do not want them to be speaking for the group during debates after they'd been on what looked like a paid tour," they added.

Since the Russian invasion, parliamentary aides have been advising their MEPs not to be pictured next to either candidate, because of their history of pro-Russian rhetoric, which generally does not go down well domestically, the source said.

A second source described them as "outliers" who are not representative of the majority view within their group.

A third parliamentary source said that while they had been initially viewed as "harmless rogues", Daly and Wallace are now treated with suspicion.

"They're using their European platform as a launch pad to seemingly promote Russian, Chinese and Iranian state interests," they said.

"They have become stars within authoritarian state media circles and are now viewed as some of the most extreme voices in the European Parliament. They are deeply anti-European."

China has barely figured in the EU election debate, but some other members have got into bother over the nature of their ties to Beijing.

An assistant for Maximilian Krah - the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD)'s top lawmaker in Brussels - was arrested in April on suspicion of spying for China.

Weeks later, Krah was banned from making public appearances for the AfD and resigned from its leadership after telling an Italian newspaper that he did not think all members of the Nazi SS were criminals.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2024. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.