Talks be­tween Garvin Nicholas and the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) have col­lapsed, prompt­ing the Move­ment for Na­tion­al De­vel­op­ment (MND) leader to con­firm he will in­de­pen­dent­ly con­test the Diego Mar­tin North East seat in the 2025 gen­er­al elec­tion.

In a state­ment post­ed to so­cial me­dia, Nicholas said it had “al­ways [been his] in­ten­tion to con­test Diego Mar­tin North East in 2025,” and that he made this clear when the UNC in­vit­ed him to dis­cus­sions about form­ing a “coali­tion of in­ter­est.”

He ac­knowl­edged there was “cer­tain­ly util­i­ty in sug­ges­tion of work­ing with the UNC,” not­ing pol­i­cy syn­er­gies and the po­ten­tial to con­sol­i­date op­po­si­tion votes in what he called “a dif­fi­cult con­stituen­cy.” But, he added, “the UNC’s lead­er­ship have cho­sen a path in­con­sis­tent with my plan for DMNE and quite frankly in my view, in­im­i­cal to the in­ter­ests not on­ly of the peo­ple of DMNE but of an en­tire coun­try.”

“While I am dis­ap­point­ed, I am not daunt­ed,” Nicholas wrote. “Nei­ther will I sit here in Diego Mar­tin and have any­one who doesn’t un­der­stand DMNE fa­cil­i­tate fur­ther stag­na­tion for an­oth­er 5 years.”

The an­nounce­ment drew at­ten­tion on­line, in­clud­ing from at­tor­ney Lar­ry Lal­la, who re­cent­ly re­signed from the UNC and was seen at the PNM’s launch of can­di­dates in Wood­ford Square. In a com­ment un­der Nicholas’s post, Lal­la asked, “You and Kams fall out too?”

Nicholas re­spond­ed, “Don’t take po­lit­i­cal de­ci­sions per­son­al­ly. I had a con­ver­sa­tion that didn’t work out. How­ev­er, my phi­los­o­phy hasn’t changed.”

He con­firmed he will move ahead un­der the MND ban­ner, call­ing it the ve­hi­cle to “trans­port the hopes and dreams of a peo­ple very dear to me for­ward in­to the bril­liant fu­ture I en­vis­age for us all.”

Nicholas al­so is­sued an ap­peal across po­lit­i­cal lines, urg­ing cit­i­zens to join his cam­paign. “Whether you are UNC, dis­grun­tled PNM or any oth­er po­lit­i­cal stripe, it does not mat­ter, I am com­mit­ted to work­ing with you and for you, ALL OF YOU, now and for the next 5 years.”

Sources close to the on­go­ing ne­go­ti­a­tions in­di­cate that the Pro­gres­sive Em­pow­er­ment Par­ty (PEP), led by Phillip Ed­ward Alexan­der, is ex­pect­ed to field can­di­dates on be­half of the UNC in the Diego Mar­tin con­stituen­cies.