Ken Ali

The Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) not on­ly lost the gen­er­al elec­tion yes­ter­day. The par­ty al­so gave up the pop­u­lar vote. The Elec­tions and Bound­aries Com­mis­sion (EBC) is ex­pect­ed to pro­vide the fi­nal tal­ly of votes to­day, but in­di­ca­tions late last night were that the PNM would have sur­ren­dered ma­jor­i­ty sup­port. Patrick Man­ning's par­ty polled 299,813 votes in the No­vem­ber 2007 elec­tion, ahead of the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress-Al­liance's 194,425 and Con­gress of the Peo­ple's 148,041. The re­sults yes­ter­day for the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship were more than the sum of its parts. The PNM won ra­zor-thin ma­jori­ties in the con­stituen­cies it se­cured yes­ter­day, while the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship led wider ma­jori­ties in sev­er­al of the seats in which it romped home vic­to­ri­ous.

The raw sta­tis­tics are like­ly to con­firm vot­er ap­a­thy in the PNM camp. For its part, the new­ly-mint­ed Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship was clear­ly able to mo­bilise and mo­ti­vate not on­ly core sup­port­ers, but al­so fence-sit­ters and some pre­vi­ous dyed-in-the-wool PN­Mites. Keen po­lit­i­cal ob­servers had not­ed the PNM in­dif­fer­ence dur­ing the cam­paign, point­ing to small­er sized crowds at most meet­ings and to the large num­ber of PTSC bus­es fer­ret­ing sup­port­ers to bal­isi­er meet­ings. "Bused crowds" had be­come part of the na­tion­al lex­i­con, thanks to the PNM. On the street, in the bus­es, at bar­rooms and oth­er places where the com­mon man con­verged, there was au­di­ble chat­ter about frus­tra­tion in over na­tion­al gov­er­nance. Qui­et­ly, PN­Mite in­sid­ers ad­mit­ted that the race was a tough one, in a throw­back to the man­ner in which George Cham­bers, in 1986, had avowed to the emerg­ing Na­tion­al Al­liance for Re­con­struc­tion (NAR) avalanche.

Some par­ty op­er­a­tives vir­tu­al­ly asked the par­ty faith­ful to pinch their noses and vote for the par­ty. Dr Kei­th Row­ley and Orville Lon­don open­ly sought to sep­a­rate the par­ty from leader Man­ning, who had be­come a hard-sell in spite of his in­ter­na­tion­al stand­ing as host of two pre­mier con­fer­ences. Par­ty hon­chos whis­pered their be­wil­der­ment that Man­ning would sum­mon the elec­torate at the height of Kam­la­ma­nia and in the mid­dle of a se­cured po­lit­i­cal term. Man­ning's pained face last night spoke of a leader who fell on his sword, vic­tim of swirling scan­dals and es­pe­cial­ly un­able to ex­tri­cate him­self from the Calder Hart in­famy. Row­ley, who months ago had damned this poll as the Ude­cott elec­tion, may have de­fined the po­lit­i­cal mo­ment. He may well con­tin­ue to do so, at least for the PNM.