Though signalling that the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) is willing to toe the line for the good of the country, political scientist, Dr. David Hinds yesterday said that the party wants a say in the selection process for the APNU+AFC presidential candidate.
The WPA is a member of the APNU faction of the coalition government.
“WPA will not be part of a process where decisions are made without our input and passed down to us. In that regard, yes, we definitely would want to participate in deciding on the mechanism to be used to determine who is the presidential candidate and if necessary, participate in choosing the candidate,” Hinds, a WPA Executive Member told Stabroek News when contacted yesterday.
Since Friday’s shock vote, there has been much speculation about who the coalition will choose to be its next presidential candidate. Questions had also been raised about the strength of the coalition given what has happened.
Stabroek News reached out to Minister of State and APNU’s General Secretary, Joseph Harmon but he said that he was in a meeting. Calls made to him subsequently went unanswered.
Sources close to the party however are adamant that President David Granger will be the presidential candidate. One high-ranking official acknowledged that the campaign may be too grueling given his illness but said that supporters will have it no other way. The official insisted that choosing someone else will make the return of the PPP to office a certainty.
Granger returns to Cuba today for additional chemotherapy treatment for Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, a form of cancer. Prior to his diagnosis he was visibly unwell and had lost a considerable amount of weight in a short period of time. It is expected that the presidential candidate will be on the campaign trail soon but with Granger scheduled to visit Cuba on several occasions until May, 2019 it does not seem possible. Chemotherapy can leave patients severely weak.
No exit
Hinds stressed that the WPA is not contemplating an exit from the coalition. “As the public knows, we have not been happy about the way in which the top governmental leadership has related to the party since 2015, but as a responsible party we have decided to be guided by the larger good and the national interest,” he said while adding that if there is consensus among the existing partners that “we should contest as a Coalition, the WPA would participate.”
He said though that the party will have conditions and at the moment these are being discussed by the WPA Executive. “We would prefer to engage our partners on these conditions before we release them to the media. But I can say that we would be adamant that there is consultation and joint decision making at every step of the process”, he stressed.
Hinds told Stabroek News that as a political analyst, he believes that the Coalition should face the electorate together rather than as separate entities. He said that first off parties returning to the electorate after stints in office invariably run on their record as government. “So, since they were in government together, it would be more effective to sell that record jointly rather than separately. If they go separately, there would be a fight over ownership of the record and in the end none of them would benefit from it,” he said.
Undisputed
He pointed out too that none of the Coalition parties could win an election individually. “That is, I think, an undisputed assessment. The PNC, which is the electoral machine, have at its best garnered just over 40% of the popular vote and at its worst could only muster 34%. These are known statistics. As we saw at the recent Local Government Election, the AFC has drastically declined as an electoral force. The WPA on its own has never been embraced as an electoral force. But as we saw in 2011 and 2015, when these parties participate as a joint entity, their collective electoral value increases”, he stressed.
Hinds added that the electorate views that joint entity as something more effective than the individual parties and, importantly, the joint entity is seen as a “probable winner.”
“It is also important to note that the winner is not a winner if it does not win the presidency. So, as we saw in 2011 when the APNU and AFC contested separately and together got more votes than the PPP, the latter still won the presidency,” he reminded.
Additionally, he said that when the two ran together in 2015, they retained their majority vote but also won the presidency.
Another reason they should contest together, he said is that the joint entity stands a better chance of attracting independent voters. “These include young voters of all ethnicities who are not drawn to the PNC and PPP and are now disillusioned with the AFC. But I do believe that a reinvigorated Coalition is the best
mechanism to attract these voters,” he said.
According to Hinds, the big downside of contesting together is “trust” among the partners.
“The PNC government faction has demonstrated that despite the formal embrace of coalition politics, that party’s top leadership is still driven by the politics of domination—that they cannot be trusted to keep even written promises. In other words, the smaller parties have good reason to believe that the PNC will use them to get power and then abuse and discard them once power is won,” he said.
Hinds added that on the other hand, given the defection by Persaud, the other parties, particularly the PNC would be wary of the AFC. These are real concerns, he said before opining that pursuit of the greater good should render these concerns relatively insignificant.
“Whatever happens, I think the Coalition would have a tough but not impossible job ahead. It does not have a sterling record to show, it has internal difficulties. It does not have enough time to build an effective electoral machinery and there is uncertainty about who leads the ticket. And all of that is compounded by a partly alienated and party demoralized base,” he said.
Hinds insisted though that “all is not lost if the leadership shows maturity and facilitates some healing among the partners, level with their supporters and find that sweet spot in the minds of the voters they may well still pull it off.”
