A Perspective
It took but a matter of days after President Donald Ramotar had made public the date for the holding of general elections for the country to realize that Bharrat Jagdeo would be the ruling Party’s engineer-in-chief in its bid for yet another term in office; and as the days went by it became clear that Mr. Jagdeo’s profile at the hustings would probably surpass that of the Party’s presidential candidate. For much of the time that is how it turned out.
Up until then Jagdeo has managed to keep a low enough public profile though rumours continued to fly thick and fast about the position of authority which he held within the ruling hierarchy. Accordingly, it would have made sense to the PPP to embrace Jagdeo as their political talisman for the elections campaign, a larger than life figure whose role was to seek to win back the support which the party lost at the 2011 general elections and which, in the final analysis, was the primary reason for the truncated 10th Parliament and President Ramotar’s forced decision to call early elections, bringing a premature end to his first term in office.
Analysts are now asserting that the posture of bombast and assertiveness which he has brought to his current role in the elections campaign vindicates the earlier assertions about his role as the power behind the throne. There is little doubt that for much of his presidency Mr. Jagdeo had energized the PPP faithful with his image as an assertive and energetic leader and an ‘ideas man.’ It was an image which the party had not seen in its leader since the