The 2020 General Election should have been the PNP’s great teacher. Turnout collapsed to 37.85 per cent and the party was reduced to 14 seats, which was its worst showing of the modern era. The striking feature of that defeat was not its scale but its clarity: A divided party cannot win.

The electorate did not reject the PNP’s philosophy; it declined to entrust power to a house at war with itself. This ought to have taught a second lesson: Money now moves Jamaican elections, and the campaign-finance regime is not fit for purpose. The need for serious — profoundly serious — reform of campaign funding is no longer a debatable proposition; it’s a democratic imperative.

What did the party do with these lessons? On the evidence, the PNP has not made public any post-mortem of the 2025 General Election — an odd silence from a party that claims to be a learning organisation.

In 2025 the base returned to the fold, and the seat count doubled from 14 to 28. But the base alone does not win elections. If the PNP is to win again it must grow beyond its base and earn the wider electorate. And to do that, it must regain its standing as the learning party, a movement of bankable ideas rather than a museum of grievances.

On corruption, the 2025 campaign twinned the issue with the cost of living, exposing the kink in the strategic armour. The party anchored its strategy on amplifying the prime minister’s bank accounts — a long-standing concern the multi-year focus had rendered stale. There was no political surprise; it fell flat.

For the record, the Integrity Commission examined 28 accounts associated with him; he disputes the framing — closed, dormant, insurance, and investment accounts among them; four previously undeclared accounts were flagged, no charges laid, no illicit enrichment concluded.

The word “alleged” is doing load-bearing work. The party would have done well to remember it. But here is the harder political truth the strategists missed: In this polity, corruption — especially among low-information voters and diehard supporters — is not sufficient to make a voter vote against. This is Anancy culture at work: “No better herring, no better barrel.” And where corruption is tolerated as “bly” and normalised as part of life, so normalised a vice cannot serve as a wedge. The non-certification of the statutory declaration was par for the course; it was never going to be the game changer.

The irony is that while the party anchored on the personal allegation, the stronger, systemic case sat in the commission’s own filings, underplayed. Untamed government spending brutalised the affordability message. The commission’s special report on contract awards, tabled in Parliament on October 13, 2026, found $51.6 billion in single contracts awarded above the single-source threshold in 2025, with 416 same-day awards to the same contractor above the limit. The Government, to be fair, welcomed the report and maintains the larger projects went through open competition. The figures warrant Parliament’s examination all the same. This is the money-in-politics story that actually endangers democracy, and it is the story the campaign failed to tell. Corruption as a personalised attack does not move votes where the vice itself is normalised. Corruption as system — billions in uncompetitive awards, a campaign-finance regime unfit for purpose, the effective legislation still outstanding — is the democratic imperative the party itself named in 2020 and then failed to make the case in 2025. The lesson is not that corruption does not matter. It is that personality is not platform, and a party that mistakes the former for the latter will keep losing the argument it should be winning.

Yet the party doubled down on the arrant nonsense of “policy plagiarism” rhetoric aided and abetted by none other than the ambitious and popular Damion Crawford along with the General Secretary Dr Dayton Campbell. That is what the absence of messaging discipline looks like.

Politics is about addition. It is about selling hope and optimism, rather than asking them merely to vote against the Government. This is doubly true in a transactional political environment, where the incumbent practised the psychology of “me politics” and amplified the FOMO, dangling carrots. The party knew the incumbent would not roll over and play dead. It ignored the counsel anyway.

And then there were the loose lips. The PNP chatted its way to defeat, telegraphing to its foes from platform after platform everything that should have stayed secret: Where it was leading; which JLP candidate was under pressure; what the internal numbers said. The bully pulpit was misused as a megaphone for the party’s own battle plans. The party mortgaged its pedigree on a toxic social media operation; its strategy drifting far from the message of transition and transformation it should have carried. Politicians must learn to wear bridles: Loose lips sink ships. Hence the refrain: Media training is not about wilding up the faithful into a frenzy. They are about pulling new voters and expanding the circle of support beyond the noise.

2027 AND THE GROUND RULES

There is already talk — the untamed ambition that never sleeps — of another leadership contest, with Mark Golding facing challengers whose names are already whispered. Damion Crawford is one of the best political marketers in Jamaica, but he should be concerned about coming across as narcissistic.

The PNP should not shut down any leadership contest. Contests are democratic oxygen. But the party must establish, in advance, ground rules and standards for its internal contests, and every aspirant must agree — and compel their supporters to agree — that no fundamental policy differences divide them.

I have heard no divergent policy vision between the likely contenders; what I have observed is raw ambition dressed in the claim, “I am the one who can beat Andrew Holness.” Says who? Neither Holness’s much-vaunted chess skills nor his incumbency makes him invincible.

Before any contest, every contender should submit to serious media training, public speaking coaching, and refresher training in leadership and management. Running on an “entertainer-in-chief” platform, or on the boast that one’s statutory declarations have been certified by the Integrity Commission, will not endear a candidate to the electorate, or translate into victory. And let every aspirant treat the early polls as weather reports, not verdicts.

THE WAY FORWARD

The next two years must be spent on the unglamorous work. Develop policies. Hold the Government to account with cogent alternatives. The International Monetary Fund’s October outlook projects zero growth for Jamaica in 2026; the World Bank, a 0.8 per cent contraction. Even allowing for Hurricane Melissa, these are the numbers of an economy going nowhere.

Take the message division by division, constituency by constituency. Select and train bold but humble standard-bearers and spokespersons who can articulate implementable policy. Study the standing orders of Parliament; and change parliamentary course the way some of the party’s most effective voices already have: Mark Golding, Isat Buchanan, Omar Newell, Christopher Brown, Damion Crawford, Peter Bunting, Dr Kenneth Russell, and Julian Robinson among the MPs, and senators Ramon Small-Ferguson, Cleveland Tomlinson, Allan Bernard and Professor Floyd Morris by being less performative and more effective and substantive.

On the ground, the party must rebuild its machinery — political literacy, recruitment, training, enumeration, conversion, canvassing, and retention. The secretariat needs a serious overhaul. The party needs a communications strategy and leadership to execute it. And to attract the financial support all of this requires, the PNP must present itself as a seriously viable alternative Government.

The party’s demographic clock is ticking. The over-55 base that anchors both parties is thinning rapidly; and the PNP, which leans more heavily on that base, cannot ignore the arithmetic. The party must quicken the transition of younger professionals into its leadership. Some work has been done; the recruitment of competent young people must reflect the fierce urgency of now.

The party’s vice-presidents should embody young energy and commitment — not be stacked with protectors of the leader, nor with aspirants whose chief qualification is wanting the top job next. A good rabble-rouser does not automatically make a great leader; the discipline and skill requirements are vastly different.

The Opposition’s answer to a difficult House Speaker is preparation; master the standing orders so it can hold any Speaker to account. The present chair is exceedingly knowledgeable and competent but struggles to stay impartial and restrained when ruling on or reprimanding Opposition members — an easy invitation to infer bias and intolerance.

An Opposition that is unprepared will always look like the junior party in the room. Parliament is where competence is highlighted and bona fides built — not a stage for endless comic relief and unserious ploys. The House rewards the prepared and exposes the merely performative.

The PNP is nearly 89 years old. It has history, talent, and ideas. What it must now find is the discipline to unite in practice and not merely in slogan, to interrogate its defeats honestly, to prepare its leaders properly, and to do the slow work of organisation. The way forward is not mysterious; it’s simply hard. That is what leadership is for. Who will rise up?

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Christopher Burns