EDWARD Seaga’s Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) broke its long electoral drought yesterday by winning the local government elections, taking 11, and more likely a dozen, of the island’s 13 parish councils.

The JLP and the People’s National Party (PNP), which has been in power at the national level since 1989, were each tied with 11 seats in the Clarendon authority. But with the JLP assured of the popular vote in that parish, it seems almost certain that it will, under the electoral laws, be returned for the JLP, unless a recount of votes changes the seat numbers. The result was a replay of what happened in 1986 when the PNP won the parish council elections in the middle of the JLP’s second term and went on to win the national government three years later.

With an eye clearly on the future, Prime Minister P J Patterson, who has indicated that he will step down before the next general election due in 2007, said that his party would have to review the message from the poll.

“I think we will have to do some analysis of what the results reflect,” he told reporters. However, Patterson’s information minister, Burchell Whiteman, seemed to suggest it might herald something profound, telling journalists that the results were a “movement of political ascendancy”. But Whiteman, at the same time, said that the results did not reflect “a wipeout of the PNP”.

Until yesterday, the JLP had not won an election since 1983 — and that was uncontested because of a PNP boycott of the general because Seaga, then the prime minister, had not fulfilled a pledge not to go to the polls without an updated register.

Since then, up to yesterday’s victory, the JLP, and Seaga, had lost seven elections on the trot, including last October’s national poll when the PNP retained the Government with an eight-seat majority in the 60-seat House of Assembly.

But last night Seaga, who had pitched the election as a referendum on the administration, savoured the victory and, despite warning of over-exuberance, suggested that it was just the first stop to his party regaining the national government.

“I asked the people to send a message,” he told supporters at the JLP’s headquarters at Belmont Road in Kingston. “They sent a powerful message.

“It (the election results) means a stronger balance (between the parties),” Seaga added. “I say to the PNP, you control central government. Let the JLP now take over local government and lead the people, for the time being.”

In what was generally a close contest, only 530,388 people, or 40.1 per cent of the electorate, cast their ballots, with the JLP winning 51.45 per cent of the popular vote, based on the preliminary numbers from the Electoral Office of Jamaica. The PNP got approximately 49 per cent. In last October’s general election, the PNP won 51.59 per cent of the popular vote, while the JLP won 46.92 per cent.

Only in Westmoreland, Prime Minister P J Patterson’s home parish and where he represents a constituency, did the PNP win the local government authority, taking nine of the 13 ridings. The PNP also had the consolation of winning the first directly elected mayorship of Portmore, the sprawling community of 160,000 people just west of Kingston that was recently designated a municipality.

Significantly, the PNP lost its hold on the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation, which runs the capital and the adjoining St Andrew parish, as well as the St James Parish Council, the local government whose coverage includes Montego Bay, the island’s tourist resort capital.

Yesterday’s defeat for the PNP, only eight months after its general election victory, was in the context of a sharp decline in economic confidence since last November when it emerged that the Government would run a public sector deficit nearly twice the projected level of 4.4 per cent.

This precipitated a $14-billion tax package at budget time in April as the Government sought to win back the confidence of the local and international money markets, as well as a deep devaluation of the Jamaican dollar in May, which has caused the central bank to jack-up interest rates and intervene heavily in the foreign exchange market.

Patterson conceded that the state of the economy played a role in his party’s defeat, but indicated that he felt compelled to call the municipal elections after several postponements over the past two years.

“I don’t think I should conceal the fact that going to the electorate at this particular time, after the budget exercise, was something that was done in pursuit of our obligations to hold local government elections within a time-frame and to allow the local government reforms to advance,” he told reporters at the PNP’s headquarters at Old Hope Road in the capital.

But he also blamed the party’s showing on organisational problems, including difficulties with some candidates and a failure to bring out PNP supporters in a tight race.

“We did not manage to get out the required voters in critical divisions so we were unable to get the number of votes that were required to convert slender minorities into majorities (for the PNP),” Patterson said.

Mostly JLP-controlled local government councils will have to co-exist with a central PNP administration which controls the purse strings.

Patterson, however, indicated his intention to work with the new councils to push forward local government reform.

“We will obviously have to continue the process of organisation,” he said.