Keane tells WIRED he has supported President-elect Donald Trump for nearly three decades and that his victory last month was proof that the 2020 election was stolen. “I think Donald Trump’s previous election was rigged,” Keane says. “Everyone voted for him in the United States.”
On Friday night, wearing a distinctive red MAGA baseball cap with the word United States replaced with Ireland, Keane posted a video on TikTok claiming he saw the president at his local polling place “ripping pages of ballots out of the ballot book.” .
“I counted another six ballots that were torn out of the poll book and placed on the table,” he continued. Voting ballots must only be torn out in the presence of the voter.
Keane tells WIRED he believes this was evidence that the election was “rigged” against him. “When I saw what they did at (my) polling station, I knew that that night, no matter who voted for me, I was not going to get in.”
Keane reported the incident to police, who confirmed to WIRED that they are investigating the incident. He also reported the incident to the constituency returning officer, Padraig Burke, who told WIRED he was aware of the situation and was satisfied that nothing illegal had happened. “I investigated…and (the president) didn’t do anything wrong,” Burke says.
But Keane’s video went viral. It has been viewed nearly 250,000 times on TikTok and received hundreds of thousands more views on other platforms, where it is shared in far-right communities as evidence that the election was rigged. Although Keane received less than 2 percent of the vote in Kerry, he still promises to run again in the next general election in five years. “I was up against a system that was rigged from the start, but this is just the beginning for Michelle Keane, it’s not the end,” says Keane.
Recriminations within the far-right community have already begun, and members of the National Alliance(a broad set of far-right parties) that already confront each other in social media posts.
“Keith keep your nose out of Irish affairs because all you’re doing is causing trouble and telling lies, stay the night with Fuentes,” far-right firebrand Michael O’Keeffe wrote on X in response to a Substack post by Keith Woods. (real name Keith O’Brien), an Irish far-right influencer and close ally of American white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
But experts warn that seeing this moment as the end of the far-right movement in Ireland is shortsighted, given that it has already managed to shift the Overton window to the right. In the run-up to the elections, numerous candidates from the main political parties advocated more extreme policies regarding immigration, echoing those of the extreme right. These groups aren’t going anywhere either: chats in far-right Irish Telegram groups in recent days outline a vision for the next five, ten and twenty years.
“The threat from the far right in this country has never been that they would seize political power, but rather that they would get the establishment to adopt their ideas, rhetoric and policies, which has certainly happened, and that they would make Ireland a more hostile country. “A dangerous and dangerous place for people of color, foreigners and Muslims, something they will continue to do,” Dean Buckley, an independent researcher who closely follows Irish far-right communities, tells WIRED. “They have not fulfilled their immediate ambitions, but none of the social, economic or political conditions that have allowed and encouraged the growth of the far right will improve in the short term.”