To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

?Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning is right when he points to the in­her­ent in­sta­bil­i­ty of coali­tion move­ments formed in this coun­try.

Speak­ing at a meet­ing of the rul­ing Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment in Plum Mi­tan in the con­stituen­cy of Cu­mu­to/Man­zanil­la on Mon­day, the Prime Min­is­ter out­lined sev­er­al in­stances when coali­tion par­ties–in gov­ern­ment or out–fell apart be­cause of ir­rec­on­cil­able dif­fer­ences. Mr Man­ning point­ed to the in­sta­bil­i­ty in the Unit­ed Labour Front be­tween for­mer Op­po­si­tion Leader Bas­deo Pan­day and for­mer mu­ti­neer Raf­fique Shah in the 1976 to 1981 Par­lia­ment. He not­ed, as well, the es­tab­lish­ment of a coali­tion gov­ern­ment by the Na­tion­al Al­liance for Re­con­struc­tion in 1986 and the fact that that arrange­ment fell apart two years lat­er when Bas­deo Pan­day formed Club 88. In 1995, there was a coali­tion gov­ern­ment of sorts as the Pan­day-led Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress won 17 seats and went on to form the gov­ern­ment as it aligned with the two NAR To­ba­go seats.

Even that coali­tion broke down as the UNC was able to woo two mem­bers of the PNM, which was then in op­po­si­tion, and dis­pensed with the min­is­te­r­i­al ser­vices of Pamela Nichol­son, who was dropped as the Min­is­ter of Sports and Youth Af­fairs in Sep­tem­ber 1998. While it is true that coali­tion gov­ern­ments in the lo­cal con­text have proven to be very un­sta­ble, what Mr Man­ning may have missed in his analy­sis of the in­sta­bil­i­ty of the UNC and its pre­de­ces­sor par­ties is the di­vi­sive pres­ence of Bas­deo Pan­day in all such arrange­ments. Mr Pan­day can lay claim to hav­ing es­tab­lished and de­stroyed more po­lit­i­cal par­ties than any­one else in his al­most 34 years in ac­tive pol­i­tics, span­ning from Sep­tem­ber 1976 when he be­came Op­po­si­tion Leader to Jan­u­ary this year when the par­ty he found­ed re­ject­ed him. One of the ques­tions that the elec­torate would be re­quired to an­swer come May 24 is whether a UNC-led coali­tion gov­ern­ment–with­out the coali­tion-de­stroy­ing pres­ence of Mr Pan­day–can hold to­geth­er long enough to rule the coun­try ef­fec­tive­ly, if elect­ed.

With­out at­tempt­ing to pre­judge that is­sue, it is a fact that the UNC-led coali­tion, as con­sti­tut­ed at present, is an am­bi­tious project which brings to­geth­er par­ties that rep­re­sent dif­fer­ent in­ter­ests. The UNC, whose base is among work­ing class In­do-Trinida­di­ans, leads a coali­tion com­pris­ing a To­ba­go par­ty, a black em­pow­er­ment par­ty, a Marx­ist-flavoured "par­ty," and a mid­dle class, mul­ti-racial par­ty. Clear­ly, in a lo­cal con­text, for such an ag­glom­er­a­tion to be suc­cess­ful, it must be led by peo­ple of great ma­tu­ri­ty and wis­dom and who agree to abide by a well thought-out coali­tion agree­ment which pro­vides built-in con­flict res­o­lu­tion mech­a­nisms and the ap­pro­pri­ate checks and bal­ances.

It re­mains to be seen whether the five lead­ers of the con­stituent par­ties of the UNC-led coali­tion have the req­ui­site ma­tu­ri­ty and wis­dom to hold an ad­min­is­tra­tion to­geth­er and whether the process of coali­tion build­ing has had enough time, and thought, to pro­duce an agree­ment that can with­stand ir­rec­on­cil­able dif­fer­ences. That be­ing said, there is no in­ter­na­tion­al ev­i­dence that says that coali­tion par­ties are in­her­ent­ly un­sta­ble.�In fact, there are many coun­tries that have in­sti­tu­tion­alised sys­tems of coali­tion gov­ern­ments that have proven to be very suc­cess­ful.

In re­cent years, coali­tion gov­ern­ments have been part and par­cel of the pol­i­tics of coun­tries as di­verse as Turkey, Nor­way, Swe­den, Den­mark, Aus­tria, Italy, Japan, Is­rael and Switzer­land. Most of these coun­tries have cen­turies of his­to­ry, high stan­dards of liv­ing and dom­i­nance by a sin­gle eth­nic group. But coali­tions have al­so ruled very suc­cess­ful­ly in coun­tries that are mul­ti-racial, prac­tise West­min­ster-type democ­ra­cy and have economies that are de­vel­op­ing–coun­tries like ours, in oth­er words. In Malaysia, the Barisan Na­sion­al coali­tion (and its pre­de­ces­sor) has ruled for half a cen­tu­ry and the coun­try is now run by a coali­tion with over a dozen con­stituent mem­bers.

It would be an in­ter­est­ing irony if Malaysia–the lo­ca­tion of the head of­fice of the Sun­way con­glom­er­ate made con­tro­ver­sial by the Uff Com­mis­sion of En­quiry–be­came the tem­plate for the UNC in the con­struc­tion of a sta­ble coali­tion in a mul­ti-racial, de­vel­op­ing, West­min­ster-type democ­ra­cy.