Pe­ter Bal­roop

?Most po­lit­i­cal com­men­ta­tors are stay­ing clear from pick­ing names of po­ten­tial suc­cess­ful can­di­dates in the UNC in­ter­nal elec­tion. How­ev­er, strong views were ex­pressed on the fall­out, and even hints on how the vot­ing could go. A hint was al­so giv­en that when the dust set­tled the swing vot­ers in mar­gin­al con­stituen­cies must be cor­ralled. A warn­ing, too, went out to po­ten­tial sore losers. UWI In­ter­na­tion­al Re­la­tions lec­tur­er, Dr In­di­ra Ram­per­sad was in the lat­ter mode say­ing for the cru­cial three-way fight for po­lit­i­cal leader: "Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar seems to have pop­u­lar sup­port but Mr Pan­day is the in­cum­bent. "We have to keep in mind, giv­en that the cur­rent list of vot­ers that ex­ists had tra­di­tion­al­ly vot­ed Mr Pan­day, un­less mem­bers of that list have switched their al­le­giance to some­one else, he can re­main." She thought the third con­tender for po­lit­i­cal leader, Ramesh Lawrence Ma­haraj, who had done his work in the field, had not re­ceived the same lev­el of me­dia cov­er­age as his ri­vals.

The gen­der, al­co­hol and race cards had been played, con­vinc­ing her that this in­ter­nal elec­tion seemed to have a moral­i­ty of its own. She thought the vot­ers list should have been more trans­par­ent. One sig­nif­i­cant fact for her was Per­sad-Bisses­sar's camp had drawn a huge crowd on Wednes­day at St Julien Vil­lage, New Grant which is Pan­day's home­town. Her last word, how­ev­er, was: "Pan­day is like a phoenix, he can rise from the ash­es, even at his age." Asked for his com­ments, po­lit­i­cal sci­en­tist, Derek Ram­samooj, com­ment­ing from An­guil­la, said, "Call Yese­nia Adams..." But on a se­ri­ous note, he did not think the po­lit­i­cal leader re­sult, any way it hung, could in­flu­ence PM Patrick Man­ning to hold a snap gen­er­al elec­tion be­fore it was due in 2012. "I think Mr Man­ning would use the lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tions as a lit­mus test be­fore any con­sid­er­a­tion of go­ing to a na­tion­al gen­er­al elec­tion," he said.

Strate­gies for UNC

The new po­lit­i­cal leader from to­mor­row would have to find strate­gies to:

1. Heal the UNC as a vi­able po­lit­i­cal en­ti­ty, in the first place putting forth an olive bran­cyh to all par­tic­i­pants;

2. Find meth­ods to win pub­lic trust and es­tab­lish a po­lit­i­cal di­a­logue not on­ly with the COP, but with all in­ter­est­ed po­lit­i­cal par­ties and na­tion­al stake­hold­ers;

3. Find a new for­mu­la to cre­ate an al­ter­na­tive po­lit­i­cal ve­hi­cle that can win pub­lic trust among swing vot­ers in the mar­gin­al con­stituen­cies.

"The ma­jor po­lit­i­cal chal­lenge would be fram­ing a pub­lic de­bate on so­lu­tions to law­less­ness, al­le­ga­tions of cor­rup­tion and eco­nom­ic mis­man­age­ment," said Ram­samooj. He would not like to see le­gal back­lash­es af­ter the polls, but felt that there just might be sore losers, though it would be the UNC which would suf­fer for that. (PB)