I followed the launch of the Saint Lucia Labour Party’s Choiseul candidate on Sunday and what I saw and heard underlined my earlier posits that the ruling party is not only running a far-superior and more-meaningful election campaign, but also attracting wider national support beyond the usual party faithful.
The launches of the last four SLP candidates, compared with the last four for the opposition United Workers Party (UWP), gave SLP supporters greater confidence of growing support at a time when the UWP is finding difficulty to maintain is earlier heady pace.
Undecided voters are increasingly gravitating to the SLP as the unknown Election Day draws nearer and more UWP supporters are quietly switching sides, encouraged by the way the Philip J. Pierre administration has governed since winning the July 26, 2021, General Elections with a 13-4 majority that quickly metamorphosed into a 15-2 parliamentary majority.
The presence of two Independent (former UWP) MPs in the Cabinet of Ministers over the past four years and the absence of former Prime Minister Dr Kenny D. Anthony has not yielded the political catastrophe the UWP’s leadership and most-ardent propagandists prayed for and dreamed of — and the SLP is again presenting largely the same slate, not fielding candidates against its two independent allies.
Itself supporting two independents, the SLP has shown no fear about the decision by former Castries Central candidate Stanley Felix to contest the next poll as an independent, with speculation still running wild as to whether he’ll be a spoiler for the sitting MP or his UWP challenger, while the MP has again won the SLP Leader’s endorsement.
There are several persons with eyes on launching new parties or contesting as independents, but most analysts feel that unless they latch onto either the SLP or UWP, they will simply end up as names and statistics in published post-election results.
The SLP is making a case for not only a second term, but also to win the only two seats it didn’t in 2021 (Choiseul-Saltibus and Micoud South) — and if anything, the SLP’s respective candidates definitely threaten the UWP’s incumbents, if only because they represent a party the electorate clearly showed its lost confidence in, dealing it its second-worst rejection since the SLP’s 16-1 victory under Dr Anthony in 1997.
But then, even with such assurances, the SLP continues carefully crafting its campaign, appealing to UWP supporters who can no-longer hope for change in and from their party, which only seems to wish to win by painting the government for what it’s not, using Information Technology to reshape crowd sizes and spreading Fake News during national emergencies.
Nothing the Opposition has said and done since launching its campaign seems to have generated the levels of public support its leadership would have prayed for, with even UWP candidates being quoted as saying if the party can’t draw people to its rallies anymore, it might as well think about whether it should contest the election.
At the end of the day, however, whether the SLP returns to office for a second term or whether it will achieve its dream of winning all-17 seats will boil down to how many people its machinery will pull out of their homes on Election Day – the day that most counts in every election campaign anywhere.
Saint Lucians, Vincentians, Barbadians, Dominicans and all CARICOM citizens getting ready for upcoming elections will surely measure their opposition party’s (or parties’) ability to better the government’s performance.
Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana and Jamaica held elections earlier this year and while regime change played-out in the twin-island republic, voters in Guyana and Jamaica returned the ruling parties with different mandates, but both placed with their nations’ futures in their hands.
President Dr Irfaan Ali’s administration has to continue contending with Venezuela’s claim to two-thirds of its territory, today in a context of a possible Third World War starting on the other side of its border – and possibly (hopefully not) through a ‘false flag’ operation to justify an invasion and violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty and Caribbean’s designation as a Zone of Peace.
But while the Prime Minister Andrew Holness and his Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) were happy to have won the last general Elections on September 4, they never expected that two months later Hurricane Melissa would have changed their mission to one of solving urgent and monumental national needs.
It is also for such reasons that Caribbean voters are becoming increasingly conscious that they should elect governments that can safely handle national and global emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic, for which the last UWP administration was extremely unprepared as it sought to find impossible ways to remain in office.
People are naturally attracted by and supportive of the way the current administration took hold of national problems, reducing unemployment to its lowest and taking employment to its highest in both private and public sectors, found money to subsidize energy and food products, to pay outstanding wages and increase public servants and government pensioners’ payments, to increase help for the most-needy, erase school fees and keep the economy growing annually.
This is the reality the Saint Lucia opposition is closing its eyes to.
But everyone can see, feel and hear differently – and the more who decide to register their different feelings on Election Day, the happier they will be to be counted among those who helped make the decisive change necessary to confirm they prefer continuity than regression.
Until Election Day, barring unforeseen natural or engineered circumstances, the SLP simply needs to continue campaigning methodically in each constituency, with its ultimate objectives in mind: winning with another super majority.
The UWP, on the other hand, still has time to start accepting it was rejected four years ago.
But instead, its standing on its head and refusing to eat humble pie – which can only humiliatingly help the SLP win the entire election fruitcake!