The campaign towards general elections in Trinidad & Tobago, announced in mid-June to be held on September 7, appears to be getting more and more truculent, leading some observers to wonder what the atmosphere will be like by the time the scheduled date arrives.
It will be recalled that such was the pressure that then Prime Minister Patrick Manning felt during his tenure after the general elections of 2007, that he decided to call general elections a little over two years before they were statutorily due. On this occasion Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar seems to have felt it necessary to call elections in June, with a scheduled date almost three months later, suggesting that her ruling United National Congress (UNC) needs some time to put its house in order. And this rationale seems obvious when the coalition with which she went to the polls in 2010 – the People’s Partnership ‒ and which gained 29 seats to the People’s National Movement’s (PNM’s) 12, has virtually dissolved leaving the Prime Minister to fight essentially under the traditional banner of the UNC.
In part, the decision to announce an election date relatively early must have been influenced by the furore over Jack Warner’s entanglement involving his FIFA record, a factor which the Prime Minister must have felt, would give him little time and opportunity to organize his new political formation, given the charges laid against him by the American authorities.
Few would place bets on Warner showing any substantial strength, given what certainly appears to be the burden of fighting, not so much against either the PNM or the UNC, but against the case made for his extradition to the United States, and the hardly favourable revelations that this is likely to involve. And this appears to be confirmed, when early attempts by Mr Warner to, as it were, fling a number of allegations of improper behaviour against leading Ministers of the present government, including Mrs Persad-Bissessar, do not seem to have impressed public opinion.
This of course, will be the first election fought by Mrs Persad-Bissessar on her own. On the last occasion she had the support of major trades unions, as well as of smaller groupings representing the intellectual left and disgruntled middle class supporters of Patrick Manning’s PNM. Yet it is noticeable that an early attempt to form a new party, seeming to represent the middle to upper classes, appears to have failed to get off the ground, leaving a sense that the elections will be between essentially the traditional UNC, and the PNM led by Dr Keith Rowley.
In that context, the UNC leadership appears to have convinced itself that Rowley has not yet obtained the full and committed support of the general PNM support base, and that time is of the essence in ensuring that he is not able to do so. Yet there appear to be signs that the PNM support base is concerned about what, to them, seems the tendency to domination of the UNC, leaving their party with an insufficient support base to protect them. In the face of this, Rowley and the leadership seem to be placing their focus on an old PNM theme, that the UNC has ceased to observe the canon of maintaining appropriate behaviour in public life.
Yet, it appears that the main source of their evidence is the revelations of Jack Warner, whom the PNM itself has never seen as a paragon of virtue. And in any case, it would appear that such will be the prominence of the story of Warner’s career if the Trinidad Attorney General proceeds with the necessary judicial requirements for sending him off to the US before September 7, that it would be hard to sell evidence from Warner as necessarily credible or provable before that date.
The UNC is going into the elections on the strength of the Trinidad & Tobago economy which, they hope will maintain itself, even in the face of lowering oil prices. The Prime Minister has already been making major pronouncements of economic and general road construction projects, while insisting that her government has maintained the vibrancy of the country’s economy. She is likely to be claiming success as an achievement of the UNC, given the gradual withdrawal from the front line of personalites like Dr Winston Dookeran, Minister of Foreign Affairs in the government elected in 2010. And in any case, the signs are that with the actual dissolution of the governing coalition, those who elected it will split their support between the two parties, difficult as they may have felt it, five years ago, to support the PNM.
This is unlikely to be strongly disputed by the PNM, who will, as we have suggested, continue to focus in their campaigning on the past and potential price of alleged government corruption, and the dangers of allowing the UNC to continue on the path on which they appear to be proceeding.
As in other Caribbean countries, the issue of crime has a certain salience, now highlighted during the election campaign by court proceedings relating particularly to the murder of the noted attorney-at-law Dana Seetahal. Omens of past times have been brought to the forefront during the campaign, as July marked the anniversary of the attempted coup against the National Alliance for Reconstruction government in 1990; and it saw the hauling in by the police for interrogation vis-à-vis the Seetahal murder, of Yasin Abu Bakr, the leader of that event. Political nerves appear to be rising in what both sides see as a decisive struggle for leadership of the only really vibrant economy in the Region.
