With local government election due this year, the opposition party, United National Congress (UNC) and its non-elected counterpart, Congress of the People (COP), are drifting toward the kind of political engagement that their respective constituencies have been hoping for since the last general election. In a surprising media conference on Friday, both the COP's Winston Dookeran and the UNC's Kamla Persad-Bissessar agreed that the next election would find both parties working "towards charting and drafting and crafting strategies for unification." Both political leaders committed to contesting the upcoming local government election in a "one-to-one arrangement," suggesting that the parties would, at the very least, not step on each other's toes in their efforts to mount a credible effort to win votes from the PNM.
The meeting fulfils the least requirements of Persad-Bissessar's election trail commitments to the nebulous goal of "unity" that became the foundation of her successful campaign for the post of UNC political leadership. But this remains the minimum that can and should be done. The COP has survived politically through a combination of aggressive campaigning for public attention and a surprisingly robust core of supporters who adamantly continued to reject other political alternatives. A UNC, led by Kamla Persad-Bissessar, addresses at least some of the concerns of that steadfast group of COP supporters, and it would be a naive COP leadership that would expect the political status quo to stand without some effort at political accommodation.
But even the most fickle COP supporter will not have missed the turbulence that still remains at the heart of the UNC's leadership. The recalcitrance of former political leader and Couva North MP, Basdeo Panday, to acknowledge and engage the electoral wishes of his own party, is now amplifying into a deeper divide, as three wilful UNC backbenchers: Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, Kelvin Ramnath and Panday, seem keen to stoke the worst fears of UNC hardliners by absenting themselves from the party's caucus meetings, and convening their own gatherings. These parallel groupings were described by Couva South MP, Kelvin Ramnath, as an effort to ensure that "the party doesn't run away with a few opportunists."
"We who laboured to build the UNC would not want to see the UNC end up like the NAR," Ramnath explained. And at the heart of the challenges facing a meaningful UNC-COP alliance and the paranoia of the slivers of the UNC still opposing Kamla Persad-Bissessar is precisely this fear; the terror of disenfranchisement and the rise of a party driven exclusively by the concerns of the middle class. The lessons of the NAR, the ONR before it and the COP after it, are simple ones. A political party in Trinidad and Tobago cannot gather enough votes to win even a single representative seat in Parliament without the decisive support of that political sector described as "the base�" the large, vote-aware constituency of the electorate that has vulgarly been courted on the basis of the principles of covenants, compensation and clan.
The collapse of the NAR, the first and only meaningful opposition merging of a range of classes in defiance of the PNM, remains an instructive chapter in Trinidad and Tobago's political history. At the heart of that political coalition's failure was the inability to cement a common political philosophy and alignment of intent that satisfied all the players. Without that fundamental discussion, any attempt at merging political cultures will, ultimately, be doomed to failure and remain a coalition of candidates and opportunity, rather than a real political party.
At Friday's meeting, it was clear that the COP and UNC political leaders at least acknowledge the enormity of the challenge before them, how unprecedented that work is and the reality of resistance within their own parties to the fundamental changes that the effort will bring. Bringing political maturity to the electorate will begin with a demonstration of maturity in political leaders, and the example that the UNC and the COP sets on this critical issue will be worth observing during the coming months.
