Ireland is going to the polls in a general election that could turn into Independents Day, with newly elected, unaligned deputies hoping to play a central role in forming a new government.

More than 3 million people are eligible to vote, and there are 552 candidates contesting 157 seats in the Dáil, the Irish parliament. Polls close at 10pm on Friday night, and counting begins on Saturday.

Opinion polls in the run-up to the vote suggest that the existing Fine Gael-Labour coalition will fall short of the required 79 seats needed for another working majority.

All polls throughout the three-week campaign forecast that Enda Kenny’s Fine Gael party would retain its No 1 spot, but Labour faces savage losses to opposition candidates critical of the government’s austerity programme. Some polls suggest up to 20 independents could be elected, including single-issue candidates.

Among them is Shane Ross, an outspoken newspaper columnist who has flown high in the polls and could take on the role of kingmaker in post-election coalition talks.

Ross had a spring in his step on the campaign trail this week, fired up by the possibility that his non-party parliamentary bloc will be critical in determining who will be the next taoiseach.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Independent candidate and journalist Shane Ross. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA

Canvassing in Dublin Rathdown, one of the most affluent constituencies in Ireland, he told the Guardian his Independent Alliance of five Dáil deputies (TDs) will only support a coalition that agrees to major political reforms.

Ireland's general election – the Guardian briefing Read more

The Alliance has drawn up a charter of its main conditions for backing either Kenny to return as taoiseach or to elect an alternative premier after the votes are counted this weekend.

“We are calling for legislation to be introduced in the next Dáil that would outlaw political cronyism, corruption and jobs for the boys,” Ross said. “It won’t cost anything, we are not demanding anything else but reform. It must mean legislation that bars ministers in government from nominating their political allies to the boards of semi-state bodies, appointing their pals to the judiciary and promoting people they favour in the Garda Síochána [police force].

“We only support a new government that agrees to our charter on political reform because cronyism and one party coming in and looking after their chums isn’t on any more. It was corruption like this that got our political system into such trouble and ruined its reputation,” he said.



Ross, a Sunday Independent newspaper columnist who has lambasted the current government’s policies over the past five years, said he remained open to supporting Kenny as taoiseach so long as a charter of reform was accepted.



Ross is a clear frontrunner in Dublin Rathdown, having won 17,000 first preference votes in the general election five years ago. His performance was the second best in Ireland, only a few hundred votes behind Kenny.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Irish prime minister and Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny and the Labour party leader, Joan Burton, warn against voting for independent candidates. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty

In the constituency’s Mount Merrion area – regarded as a traditional Fine Gael redoubt – all but one of about a dozen voters who stopped to talk to Ross outside a supermarket earlier this week expressed their support, and the owner of a nearby cafe even offered to distribute his campaign leaflets inside her premises.

“He will certainly be getting our vote,” Anna Sweeney said, before adding that this was as much down to his campaigning on local issues as his promises to reform the national political system.

Sweeney mentioned the closure of the local swimming pool by the county council, which angered her and her daughter Natalie, who used it regularly.



“I promise that we will force the local council to get that pool back for the people,” Ross thundered as he shook hands with Natalie, a first-time voter.

The only dissenting voice in the street outside was from a woman who questioned whether voting for independents could lead to stable government. Fine Gael’s line of attack against Ross and the other independents is that a vote for them is a recipe for the kind of instability in the Dáil that led to two elections in one year during the 1980s.

In response, Ross said his group’s support for any government would be “responsible”.



“While we would vote against individual pieces of legislation any new government brings in that we don’t like, I want to make it clear that on votes of confidence in that government we will be responsible – so long, that is, that the coalition we are supporting agrees to our reform programme and outlaws political patronage in this state once and for all.”



Speaking on Thursday, the prime minister and deputy prime minister warned against a scenario where independents hold the balance of power.



Deputy prime minister Joan Burton, who is also the Labour party leader, said a small shift in voting patterns could still give her party and Fine Gael the numbers needed to form a government.

Speaking at the same venue in Dublin’s hi-tech “Google Quarter” hours before the imposition of a broadcasting moratorium at 2pm, Kenny urged voters to back the existing coalition parties to create a stable administration.

IRISH ELECTION GUIDE





Parties





Fine Gael: A party born out of loyalty to Irish independence military leader Michael Collins, who was assassinated by republican diehards for accepting the 1921 Anglo Irish Treaty that partitioned Ireland. Now centre-right in economic policy, strongly pro-European and increasingly socially liberal. Won 76 seats in the 2011 general election – an all-time high.



Fianna Fáil: Founded by Michael Collins’ great civil war rival Éamon de Valera, the party ultimately accepted the Anglo Irish settlement and became the most successful political force in post-independence Irish history. Economically centrist, often populist, it was blamed for the collapse of the Celtic Tiger amid allegations that the party was too close to property speculators and bankers. In the last election it crashed to just 20 seats.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, taoiseach Enda Kenny, Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin and Labour’s Joan Burton line up for their last TV debate on RTE Prime Time on Tuesday. Photograph: Tony Maxwell/PA

Sinn Féin: The party once known around the world as the political wing of the Provisional IRA has benefited enormously from the Northern Ireland peace process. Led by Gerry Adams, it had 14 seats in the last Dáil and is expected to return with at least 20 in this election, positioning itself as a party of protest against austerity cuts.

Labour: The oldest party in the state and rooted in the trade unions, Labour faces the possibility of electoral meltdown akin to the Liberal Democrat wipeout in the UK last year. Labour was at the vanguard of social change as junior partner in the current government, championing the gay marriage referendum, but it also took flak over the coalition’s unpopular tax rises and public spending cuts.



Anti Austerity Alliance/People Before Profit: Both parties are rooted in the far-left Socialist party (former Militant Tendency) and the Socialist Workers party. They draw support, like Sinn Féin, from urban working-class areas where there is widespread discontent over austerity.



Independents: The probable kingmakers in the new Dáil, they range from maverick centre-right radicals to former Marxists defending individual electoral redoubts.



Main issues



The recovery: Fine Gael emphasises the Irish economic recovery from the 2008 crash and the loss of economic sovereignty when the IMF took over fiscal policy in 2010. The party stresses that the recovery is fragile and needs another stable government. Critics say the measures taken to plug the gap in national finances – tax rises, public spending cuts, wage freezes, etc – were too extreme and hit those on low-to-middle incomes.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A demonstration against water charges last week. Photograph: Caroline Quinn/AFP/Getty

Water charges: One condition of the IMF bailout, which prevented national bankruptcy, was that Ireland needed to fund its own water system. The introduction of water charges prompted mass protests across the republic.



Crime: The audacious, televised attack on a boxing bout weigh-in in Dublin this month refocused the public’s mind on crime, gangsters and the drug crisis ravaging certain urban areas of Ireland, particularly in its capital. It has proved to be a problem for Sinn Féin, as the party supports the abolition of the non-jury special criminal court, an institution set up in the 1970s to convict terrorists. The other parties argue that the court is still needed to prosecute organised crime.



Possible outcomes



Uncertainty is the dominant mood. Opinion polls suggest the Fine Gael-Labour coalition will fall at least 10 seats short of the 79-plus needed for a working majority in the Dáil. The most likely option in that scenario is that the two parties seek to do deals with independent deputies, who are expected to be elected in greater numbers than ever before. A second possibility is that the biggest opposition party, Fianna Fáil, will lend support to the government for a fixed period but not enter coalition or seek cabinet seats. A third option – the coming together of old rivals Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil – has been ruled out by both parties. Another election later this year is not out of the question.