Caribbean & Central America - November 2013 (ISSN 1741-4458)

The ruling People’s Partnership (PP) and its main constituent party, the United National Congress (UNC) are going through a torrid time, with the UNC suffering its fourth electoral defeat this year in the St Joseph by-election. Some of the blame can be attached to the fall-out with former minister Jack Warner, who has been taking votes away from the ruling coalition with his Independent Liberal Party (ILP), but Warner has not made as much progress as he would have liked since his triumph in the Chaguanas West poll in July. The UNC and the PP now have 18 months to return to electoral favour before the next general election in 2015.

The first defeat of the year for the PP came in the January Tobago House of Assembly election, in which the PP coalition partner – the Tobago Organization of the People (TOP) – was humiliated by the main opposition People’s National Movement (PNM) which won all 12 seats. This was followed in July by the highly embarrassing loss of Chaguanas West to the supposedly disgraced Jack Warner and his newly formed ILP.

It was this backdrop that gave the 21 October municipal elections and the 4 November St Joseph by-election added significance, and the possibility of the ILP splitting the UNC vote that made forecasting the results particularly fraught.

The PNM duly triumphed in the local elections, winning eight of the 14 corporations, but the ILP did not make the progress it predicted. The PP held five corporations, leading Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar to proclaim: “The UNC has retained its base”.

The ILP, by contrast, failed to win any corporations and won only two of the eight seats in the Chaguanas borough (the other six being split equally between the PP and the PNM). As importantly, only one corporation was won by the PNM as a result of the ILP stripping away votes from the PP.

An analysis of the results by local expert Nigel Henry showed that in fact the ILP took more or less as many votes from the PNM as from the PP. According to Henry: “When compared against the 2003 local government election results, which were nearly identical to this year’s results in terms of the district-level outcomes, the PNM lost 11 points from 53.3% in 2003 to 42.2% this year. The United National Congress (UNC)/National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) accommodation lost 12 points from 46.4% to 34.5% this year for the PP. This means that each party or coalition contributed roughly equally in terms of historical supporters to the ILP’s 23% support in 2013.”

The failure of the ILP to make much of an impact, particularly in Chaguanas, led ILP chairman Robin Montano to say: “The results show the country has retreated to tribalism…so we have failed. It’s clear from the results we didn’t win. But we’ll try again tomorrow.”

If by “tomorrow” Montano meant in the St Joseph by-election on 4 November, he was to be disappointed there as well. The St Joseph seat has traditionally swung between the PNM and the UNC. The UNC first took the seat from the PNM in 1986, lost it in 1991, then held it from 1995-2007 before reclaiming it in 2010 with the since-defected Herbert Volney as its candidate.

The UNC went into the by-election with host of the popular local TV show, Crime Watch, Ian Alleyne as its high-profile candidate, and it ran a campaign based on the importance of erstwhile UNC supporters not splitting the vote by voting for the ILP and thus enabling a PNM victory. The PNM retaliated with various legal challenges to the UNC’s “split vote” advertisements (which purported to be a thank you from opposition leader Keith Rowley to ILP leader Jack Warner) and to the use by Alleyne of the Crime Watch theme tune at his political meetings.

A further legal challenge was mounted when the opposition asked the Integrity Commission to look into the use of state resources for projects in St Joseph. The PNM complained about “vicious manipulation” of state resources which was “ultimately to the detriment of the people, particularly when the works and projects are being done at the very last minute and solely for the purpose of winning an election”.

On the day of the election, one local commentator noted: “Today’s decision will either see the UNC retaining the marginal seat; establish the ILP as a major force with a firmer footing in the political landscape; or, like the results of last month’s elections, signal the resurgence of the PNM.”

In the event, it was the latter outcome that prevailed on a 53% turnout. The PNM candidate, Terrence Deyalsingh, won with 6,356 votes to the Alleyne’s 5,577 for the UNC. The ILP candidate took 1,976. This is not all bad for the PP/UNC. First of all, the result still leaves the PP with a very comfortable 27 seats in the 41-seat House of Representatives against the PNM’s 13. Secondly, the winning margin was just 779 votes. And, thirdly, the ILP is clearly not making much headway, although it is clearly still a nuisance as less than half of its votes would have made the difference between winning and losing for the UNC.

Although it didn’t seem to make any difference in Chaguanas West, one of the ILP’s problems may be that the corruption allegations against Jack Warner are not going away. In the latest move, on 20 October the Equality Council of Trinidad & Tobago wrote to the Integrity Commission demanding an investigation into Warner’s tax affairs after a local newspaper claimed he had failed to disclose tens of millions of dollars in cash gifts. Warner, however, remains defiant about the corruption allegations and upbeat about the ILP, describing the setback in St Joseph as a “growing pain”.

For its part, the PNM is clearly in no mood to let the question of the improper use of state resources by the UNC candidate rest. After his victory, the PNM’s Deyalsingh said that he planned to continue with the 25 projects secured from the government by Alleyne. He added, mischievously, that he was also going to request mobile phone numbers for the government ministers involved in agreeing the projects. He said: “Apparently it is easy to get things done now, you just have to call a number. I want all their cell numbers to get things done.”

More seriously, PNM leader Rowley said he would be pressing on with his complaints about government’s actions with the Integrity Commission. He said: “This government has thrown every single thing at its opponents in this election. The government has misbehaved once again, it has broken the law and has disgraced itself.”

Rowley also questioned why the government had handed out money over the weekend before the election to people purported to have been affected by floods in the Aranjuez area. He said: “We can’t recall when that flooding took place in Aranjuez and why it wasn’t dealt with before. That has to be wrong.” It looks set to be a long and dirty road to the 2015 general election.