DUBLIN — Independent socialist Catherine Connolly swept to a landslide victory Saturday to become Ireland’s next president, dealing a record-breaking rebuke to the two center-ground parties of government.

Jubilant supporters of the 68-year-old Connolly, a lawmaker from the western city of Galway, embraced and kissed her as final results from Friday’s election were announced at the Dublin Castle count center.

In her victory speech, Connolly struck an immediate note of unity. She stood side by side with Ireland’s government leaders — and pledged to challenge the far right and its anti-immigrant agenda.

“Together we can shape a new republic that values everybody, that values and champions diversity … and the new people that have come to our country,” she said. “I will be an inclusive president for all of you.”

Connolly won a record 63.4 percent of valid votes. Heather Humphreys of the government coalition party Fine Gael finished a distant second with 29.5 percent.

Connolly’s triumph shattered the previous record set in 1959 when Eamon de Valera, the towering figure of 20th-century Irish politics, won his first term as president with 56.3 percent support.

On Nov. 11, Connolly will succeed her fellow Galway socialist Michael D. Higgins, Ireland’s president since 2011, who was constitutionally barred from seeking a third seven-year term.

Finishing in third and last place Saturday was Jim Gavin of the largest government party, Fianna Fáil, who won barely 7 percent of votes. Gavin, a political novice hand-picked by Prime Minister Micheál Martin, remained on the official ballot despite quitting the race midway after admitting he had pocketed €3,300 in excess rent from a tenant.

Connolly won, in no small part, thanks to backing from Ireland’s five left-wing parties, most crucially Sinn Féin. All stood aside to give her a clean run on an anti-government platform, a political first for the normally fractious left.

While the left celebrated from Dublin Castle to Galway, Ireland’s disgruntled conservatives left their own mark on the election — by vandalizing their ballots in unprecedented numbers.

More than 200,000 ballots — or about one of every eight cast — had to be discarded. Many voters had written in the names of their own invalid choices, or drawn disparaging X marks across all three candidates. Others defaced their ballots, often with anti-immigrant messages expressed in nativist or racist terms.

Their alienation reflects how the government parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, since the 1990s have largely ditched their previous bonds with Catholic conservatism and have become, like Connolly and the wider left, socially progressive and welcoming to immigrants.

A Catholic conservative, Maria Steen, narrowly failed to qualify for the ballot, falling two short of the required backing from 20 lawmakers. Mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor, who often denounces immigrants in his social media posts, tapped out after attracting virtually no official support.

Kevin Cunningham, managing director of the polling firm Ireland Thinks, called the volume of spoiled votes “enormous.” He found that more than two-thirds of protesting voters had expressed support for Steen.

The final week of campaigning coincided with one of the biggest flare-ups of racist sentiment since downtown Dublin was wracked by rioting in November 2023.

On Tuesday and Wednesday nights, crowds of up to 2,000 people clashed with riot police protecting Citywest, a hotel and conference center southwest of Dublin that has been turned into the state’s biggest shelter for asylum seekers. That area registered one of the highest rates of spoiled ballots.

And on Friday, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, who had opted not to seek the presidency herself, was subjected to vulgar threats from an anti-immigration activist as she canvassed in her central Dublin constituency for Connolly. That man, who posted video footage of his verbal assault on McDonald and other Sinn Féin canvassers, was arrested Saturday.

Humphreys — who had stepped into the breach when Fine Gael’s original candidate, former European Commissioner Mairead McGuinness, quit the race citing health problems — conceded defeat hours before the official result. Humphreys, too, expressed worries about the rising level of social media-driven harassment.

Humphreys, a member of the Republic of Ireland’s tiny Protestant minority, said she hadn’t regretted running despite suffering a barrage of online insults belittling her family’s background. She said that vitriol had demonstrated that her country wasn’t yet ready to reconcile, and potentially unite as Irish nationalists want, with Protestants in the neighboring U.K. territory of Northern Ireland.

“My family and I were subject to some absolutely awful sectarian abuse. As a country, I thought we had moved on from that,” Humphreys said. “If we’re ever to have a united Ireland, we have to respect all traditions.”