TRINIDAD and Tobago’s local government elections concluded last Monday with an expected victory for the Opposition People’s National Movement (PNM).

Having been humiliated at both national and local government elections within five months of each other in 2010, the PNM succeeded in capturing eight of the 14 municipal corporations at stake.

The governing United National Congress — which heads a People’s Partnership (PP) administration in Port-of-Spain — secured five of the corporations, while the remaining one was hanging in the balance at the time of writing.

The Congress of Peoples (COP) — which had secured six seats at the February 2010 national elections for the 41-member House of Assembly and teamed up with the UNC’s 23 to have a governing 29-seat majority to the PNM’s 12 — failed to win a single corporation.

This was also the fate — though by no means surprising — suffered by the fledgling new Independent Liberal Party (ILP) of Jack Warner, the former highly controversial UNC chairman and national security minister in Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s Cabinet.

The victorious PNM is understandably joyful, having been very much on the defensive since losing control in 2010 of what it is generally accustomed to — the reins of State power. Now it is already boastfully talking of its return to Government at new general elections, constitutionally due not later than May 2015.

First, it must await the outcome of the coming by-election for the St Joseph constituency, a traditional marginal seat that it lost to the UNC at the 2010 general elections, and now made necessary following a decision by the speaker of Parliament to declare the seat vacant, following the resignation of the UNC’s representative for Herbert Volney, a former High Court judge.

Low voting and PR

However, a factor of much importance is the surprisingly low response by the electorate for Monday’s local government poll — less than a third of the more than one million electors eligible to vote.

For all the razzmatazz and razzle-dazzle by the contesting parties and candidates and the heavy funding of campaigning, it needs to be borne in mind that, according to available data from the Elections and Boundaries Commission, merely 26 per cent of the electorate chose to cast their ballot. This itself points to a serious indictment of the nature of the prevailing political culture.

By the weekend, local media were reporting on commentators and other responses that raised the sensitive issue of whether the country had returned to the pattern of ethnic voting.

This has been the kind of political burden that Jamaicans would recall as their classic dispensation of ‘tribal politics’ around which they rallied behind the People’s National Party and Jamaica Labour Party.

In T&T, as in Guyana, ethnic-based politics has long been a feature of the first-past-the-post electoral system. But unlike the parties in Guyana, the PNM remains resolutely opposed to any proportional representation (PR) model.

Monday’s sweet local government victory for the PNM — the significance of which the prime minister is skilfully seeking to downplay — attracts varied interpretations from the contesting parties.

Jack Warner’s less than four-month old ILP, having failed to make any impact other than further exposing the Congress of People (COP) as an extremely weak ‘partner’ of the Government — is already branding itself as the new “third force” to the UNC and PNM.

Even as he was boastfully seeking to keep hope alive among his more committed followers, the well-known lawyer and social commentator, Dana Seetahal, was raising serious doubts about the ILP’s longevity to contest the new general election scheduled for 2015.

Political arithmetic

For a start, there is next week’s by-election for the St Joseph constituency where the IPL’s splitting of the votes could well result in victory for the PNM that would increase its parliamentary representation to 13, with the UNC slipping by two (remember Warner’s defection?) but still retaining a decisive “partnership” majority of 27.

The political arithmetic and forecasts for future elections would perhaps be better addressed following the coming EBC’s declaration of allocation of seats for aldermen on the basis, for the first time, of proportional representation.

That development itself could either further the political clamour to a national switch-over to the PR system for national elections or dim such a prospect as the PNM would prefer.

For now, it is COP that has emerged as the pathetic loser for the local government election — much to the delight of Warner, whose IPL’s splitting of the votes helped to make this a bitter reality.

And with the Movement for Social Justice still facing the Herculean challenge to make any meaningful electoral impact, the voters can well expect an even more fierce battle for governance between a more experienced incumbent (UNC’s Persad-Bissessar) and a better equipped Rowley, the PNM leader, who would have acquired additional credits against critics/opponents within his own party.

More later, after the November 4 St Joseph by-election.