Following the defeat of the People’s Partnership (PP) government in Trinidad and Tobago on Monday night, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the outgoing prime minister and leader of the PP’s dominant coalition member, the United National Congress (UNC), told reporters that she didn’t think that “anything went wrong, quite frankly,” in the campaign she led against the victorious Dr Keith Rowley and his People’s National Movement (PNM). As the dust settles from the long and “brutish” (the description proffered by the chairman of the Trinidad and Tobago Elections and Boundaries Commission) election campaign and as the PP/UNC conducts the obligatory post mortem, these words may well come back to haunt her.
Mrs Persad-Bissessar was responding to media questions after a less than gracious concession speech, in which she signally failed to congratulate the prime minister-elect, and the pain of defeat was understandably palpable. This was also just before she left her southern, Siparia constituency office for home, foregoing a visit to UNC headquarters at the Rienzi Complex, Couva, in central Trinidad, where thousands of dejected supporters waited in vain for the arrival of their leader. This was the time for Mrs Persad-Bissessar to show her mettle as a leader, to thank the party faithful for their hard work and to rally her troops for the next five years in opposition and the political battles ahead. She did not.
It is a truism that it is in defeat rather than victory that a leader really shows his or her worth and, in this respect, Mrs Persad-Bissessar failed a critical test of character. Already, there is speculation among political analysts and in the Trinidad and Tobago media that this failure, along with the electoral defeat, could cost her the leadership of the UNC.
Mrs Persad-Bissessar may have been re-elected to parliament by a handsome margin in Siparia but the fact remains that she won a battle but lost the war. With hindsight, the reasons seem fairly clear.
The whole PP/UNC campaign was focused on Mrs Persad-Bissessar and her supposed achievements as prime minister, glossing over the serial missteps and scandals of the past five years. It was all about her and attempting to recapture the ‘Kamlamania’ of 2010. The concept of partnership, so crucial to the success of 2010, was misguidedly, fatally diminished. Why, the PP did not even present its full slate of candidates until the last possible moment, announcing them on the eve of the August 17 deadline, a mere three weeks before the election itself, in order to keep the spotlight on Mrs Persad-Bissessar for as long as possible.
The contest, moreover, was touted as a face-off with Dr Rowley, who was demonised in the nastiest possible manner. This may have appealed to the UNC’s base but it clearly did little to win the middle ground, as the swing to the PNM in the so-called marginal seats showed.
Indeed, by moving away from the coalition of the willing of 2010, when the PP comprised the UNC, the Congress of the People (COP), the Movement for Social Justice (MSJ), the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) and the Tobago Organisation of the People (TOP), to the personality politics of 2015 and the pretence of a partnership, with the MSJ having departed back in 2012, the COP reduced to a mere appendage of the UNC and its leader regarded as a puppet of the UNC, the TOP having been decimated in the 2013 Tobago House of Assembly elections, and the NJAC never having a real political base, Mrs Persad-Bissessar and her strategists were clearly guilty of drinking their own Kool-Aid and succumbing to the hubris of power.
That they failed to realise that their ad hominem targeting of Dr Rowley might backfire was perhaps comprehensible; after all, politics in the region just gets dirtier and dirtier, regrettably so. But that they could not see beyond the accusations of nepotism, corruption, mismanagement and excessive government spending – ironically, the very sins they accused the Patrick Manning administration of in 2010 – was the height of self-delusion and, perhaps, even worse, reflective of a belief that the majority of people could be fooled or just didn’t care. Democracy, even if imperfect, does not work like that nowadays.
