Kamla Persad-Bissessar takes the oath of office Wednesday afternoon to become Trinidad and Tobago’s first female prime minister following a landslide victory for her People’s Partnership (PP) in Monday’s general election.That in itself is an historic event, but equally important is the coalition of interests that she represents.
The People’s Partnership is a five-member coalition hastily put together when Prime Minister Patrick Manning sprung an election on the country, hoping to catch the opposition sleeping.
Kamla had just won an election on January 24 to become the leader of her party – the United National Congress (UNC) - and had promised to unite all the opposition and defeat the governing PNM. On Monday night she did it.
But the government she will lead is not a UNC government, although the UNC by itself has a majority of seats in the 41-seat House of Representatives.
It is a coalition that represents the liberal democratic views of the UNC, the more conservative policies of the Congress of the People (COP), labour, the poor and dispossessed and the regional agenda in the Tobago Organisation of the People (TOP).
It feels like an unworkable political accommodation waiting for conflict to cause an implosion like the one that shattered the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) in 1986 and led to the formation of the UNC.
That was Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s argument against a coalition during the election campaign for Monday’s election.
What is interesting is that the people accepted the coalition and rejected Manning and his PNM. The results show that the coalition won more than 430,000 votes representing nearly 60 per cent of the popular vote and that the PNM support dropped by more than 14,000 votes over the last election in 2007.
What makes this different from other experiments is that the coalition came together through intense private negotiation among the five partners and having forged an alliance the leader went to the people to seek their endorsement.
In effect Kamla kept her pledge to create a government of the people long before she had a majority and the people gave her what she requested. And now having got the mandate she has promised that she will continue to govern with the people’s consent and through consultation with them.
In 1986 when a similar arrangement propelled the NAR into office, the partners with conflicting ideologies became a unitary party with a common name, symbol and manifesto. It was almost stillborn because it was conceived through political expediency.
In 1995, the coalition that formed the government was produced after the election so the people were not involved and had to accept a deal for which they had not agreed in advance. That too came apart although it lasted a little longer that the NAR experiment.
Now for the first time in Trinidad and Tobago politics, the people had a clear choice between the governing party and a coalition representing a wide cross section of interests from the elite to the poor and dispossessed. And the people chose the coalition.
The thought crossed my mind that this might be a crude form of “pro-active proportional representation” in that it gives a voice in Parliament to groups that would otherwise be silent in the legislature.
In its most common form PR allocates seats on the basis of popular support which means that based on the votes cast on Monday the composition of the House of Representatives would have been different.
However, the experiment in unity without creating a unitary party is interesting because it brings all voices together in a single chorus instead of a cacophony of competing agendas.
How Kamla constructs her cabinet will send the first important signal of how she intends to govern and will indicate who are the real beneficiaries of this new style of Parliamentary democracy.
What she did was that rather than represent all the views proportionally through some complex formula, she brought together the political leaders of all those opposed to the status quo and negotiated a compromise that they could all agree to - a basis of unity.
By doing things that way she was able to go to the voters ahead of time with a full disclosure about the collective strategy of the team and seek endorsement or rejection with all cards on the table.
It is a remarkable achievement that she was able to bring everyone together to negotiate a compromise position while maintaining the independence of each party. That is potentially better than PR for a country such as ours.
Thus, the voters have ostensibly endorsed a coalition of opposition interests based on the negotiated platform of all the parties. Whether the system turns out to be more stable or effective than a PR system remains to be seen.
When the euphoria of the election is over and the time comes to getting to the very difficult task of governing, ruptures may begin to form along ideological lines.
The role of the Prime Minister in this Parliament will be twofold: she must perform all the normal duties of a leader of a party and leader of government, but must also play a leading role in protecting the integrity of her coalition interests which makes it closer to the traditional PR system.
There is optimism for this coalition because unlike those cobbled together after indecisive elections on almost knee-jerk basis of unity the individual groups in this team worked out the details – and hopefully their differences – well in advance and the coalition was able to market itself as the better choice for Trinidad and Tobago. And the people agreed.
Caution, courage, tenacity, and long-term strategy will be Kamla's most loyal friends in this Parliament.
She needs to beware of those who seek to flatter and she must foster a disciplined form of constructive criticism within her cabinet and caucus to maintain the basis of unity. That's the difficult challenge she faces. The task begins today.
Jai Parasram & Ajay Parasram - 26 May 2010
No comments:
Post a Comment