It’s been a bad week at the count centre for Sinn Féin, especially in the Republic. The party’s vote at a local level halved in Dublin, Lynn Boylan lost her European seat, Liadh Ni Riadh looks likely to suffer the same fate, and in Mary Lou McDonald’s own backyard the party looked like it would struggle to even manage to get one councillor elected. In total, the party lost around 78 seats in the local election with its first preference vote share decreasing by around six percentage points; its European vote share also decreased substantially.

The reaction from the party’s activists and supporters was, to put it mildly, quite angry. Much of the ire has been directed towards the Greens and other centre-left parties like the Social Democrats. Indeed, if one looked at ‘leftist Twitter’ for lack of a better term, the entirety of the party base (plus a few unaffiliated socialist and communist types) seemed to either be chastising the Greens, claiming that they were (somehow) as or even more right-wing than both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil combined; or chastising the pundits and voters for, well, not voting Sinn Féin and voting for literally anyone else. Whilst these outbursts can be somewhat amusing, they’re not exactly a ‘good look’ for a party trying to break away from a past dogged by instances of militancy and voter intimidation (never mind the arrogance of getting angry at voters for not voting for you).

To say this decline is a sign of things to come, however, is a tad premature. This has happened to them before and in future elections the party could well recover some ground and take back its share of the vote with a vengeance. But these results should still worry the top brass. The party’s infighting and accusations of candidates intimidating rival party members certainly didn’t help project the image of a unified, well-oiled election machine we’re used to seeing, especially in the North. Indeed, my own personal experience of the Sinn Féin campaign was unusually lacklustre; the candidates didn’t seem to be energised, there was none of the zeal that, for better or worse, characterised a lot of previous campaigns and could be argued to have gotten the party’s core vote out and then some. Maybe I just encountered the party and its leafleters at a bad time, but still, the lack of general energy was certainly noticeable.

Given the results, the biggest concern for the party will be where it goes from here and how it proceeds into the next set of elections, because there aren’t exactly any entirely good options. On the one hand, the party could try to become the ‘resistance at all costs’ party, opposing every single measure (even if only for opposition’s sake) put forward by any and all parties that aren’t even closely aligned to their vision for Dublin and wherever the party thinks it can regain lost ground. This might work well in re-energising its base and other solidly leftist voters who would be inclined to vote for more ‘puritanically’ left parties like People Before Profit, with both kicking up a storm over what they feel are potential policies (especially those supported by centre-left parties like Labour or the Greens) that they see as unfair and anti-working class.

However, the drawbacks to this are fairly clear: it only plays to the party base and almost nobody else. For example, take a look at a growing, influential group in Irish society: aspirational, generally liberal and environmentally-conscious young professionals. How does, for example, protesting a carbon tax appeal to that group? How does trumping up pseudo-nationalist concerns about an EU army? How does downplaying concerns that the party silenced sexual abuse victims like Maria Cahill? It doesn’t, at all.

That leads us to the other option, which is that the party needs to reach out even further across the divide and try not simply to court Labour or Social Democrat voters but actively work with those parties and heck, even Fianna Fáil, to try to get into government as an influential coalition partner. Again, the drawbacks are clear: form alliances with those you once vilified and you’ll be accused of selling out by your activists, risking a further squeeze in your vote.

Indeed, this could be why Sinn Féin’s vote shrunk so much. When McDonald took over the leadership reigns it was done with the expectation that with Gerry Adams gone her educated, middle class and clean image could appeal to a wider range of voters beyond their (largely) working-class base. Is it possible that this preparation for government made once-loyal voters and supporters wary of backing the party? Did they feel taken for granted? It’s an interesting proposition, but there’s another far more simpler explanation that also has merit: the party overperformed last time around, isn’t the flavour of the month now and so it has taken a beating. Overly simplistic? Possibly, but one can’t help but feel that the surge for the party in 2014 may have been more a vote against the Fine Gael-Labour coalition of the day rather than a vote for Sinn Féin.

As mentioned, the party has come back from losing positions before. McDonald herself lost her European seat in 2009 then went on to get elected to the Dáil in 2011; in 2016 she topped the poll in when the party surged to claim just over twenty Dáil seats. In other words, write the party off at your peril. McDonald is a determined, intelligent campaigner who is well aware that her real test lies in whether she can increase the party’s Dáil representation.

You can’t deny, however, that a new course needs to be charted – the paragraphs above show that the path to take is hardly clear. Will they return to their protest movement, street activism roots? Will they reach out across the political spectrum and form new alliances? Or could they even take a more sinister route, adopting more generally nationalistic policies on things like migration given what recent polling on the issue suggests about their voter base?

Time will tell, though unfortunately for the party leader it may not be on their side – a general election could come sooner than they think.