The dance has begun. You know which dance. The dance in which politicians, would-be politicians and has-been politicians engage in an intricate and delicate courtship ritual as they check out each other in the hopes of coming together in some form of opposition unity.
For these politicians it has become almost conventional wisdom that any coalition of the main opposition forces in the country is certain to defeat the PNM. So like it or not when the time draws near, when the anxieties are rising high, and when the people are demanding of their leaders that they ’do something’’ they step onto the floor with people they hardly like or trust or respect and begin the dance.
Those who hold to the belief that opposition unity is the silver bullet which can kill the PNM point to the results of the last general election to make their case. The numbers don’t lie they say. And the fact is that the numbers from the last election do seem to confirm their belief. The combined votes garnered by the opposition forces large and small in the last election exceeded those of the PNM by just over 50,000. That number, out of a total of some 650,000 votes cast, constitutes a significant gap.
When we look, however, at the combined votes of the opposition parties versus the PNM in terms of each constituency which, given the first-past-the-post system we operate, may be an even more accurate way of looking at the numbers, we realise that the issue is far from being as clear-cut as they would have us believe.
In terms of seats won by the PNM versus what might have been won by the combined opposition, (the UNC and the COP) my admittedly inexpert calculation shows that the PNM would have still won the election by a margin of one seat.
Let us for the sake of argument, say that my calculations are wrong and that the combined opposition would have won the election, it still would have been by the narrowest of margins. What this calculation suggests is that we should not be too complacent about the inevitability of victory on the part of just any opposition coalition party.
Of course it is not the arithmetic of the last election that the dancers most remember. The music they hear, like a bassman in their heads, is the music of the 1986 election, the music of the rainbow coalition, the music of ’One Love’. In that election, the advocates of opposition unity would argue, the fact that the opposition parties had come together in a grand coalition, transformed the simple arithmetic of the numbers into political algebra.
No one can argue that in 1986 we certainly witnessed the magic of political algebra. If we add up the votes garnered by the ULF and the ONR in the 1981 election we do not come close to the numbers achieved by the NAR in 1986. Even if we add the number of votes for Tapia and the DAC (the two other parties in the NAR coalition) neither of which had significant numerical support, it still does not come close to the number of votes actually gained by the NAR.
So that 1986 election was certainly an example of political algebra. The question however is what were the circumstances and context which prevailed in 1986 which let loose the magic and, even more important, are those circumstances and that context still the same today? Was it simply the fact that the opposition parties had come together which unleashed the magic or were there other factors at play?
The point we must remember is that political algebra is not something we can summon at will. To even begin to understand the magic we must venture into the realm of the perceptions, hopes, dreams and aspirations of the electorate on the one hand and into their fears, frustrations, resentments, and anger on the other. Political algebra must also factor in the collective experience of the electorate. In short, it is a very volatile and unpredictable realm in which the solutions can never be taken for granted and easy solutions are usually wrong.
There were many factors coming together in 1986 which made the time fertile for the magic to be unleashed. I cannot undertake an examination of all of these within the limits of this column but I think that it is important to discuss two such factors briefly.
In the first place we should recognise that the burning political question of 1986 was just how the population should go about changing a government. The PNM had been in control for 30 years. Long before 1986 we knew that the party had become riddled with corruption and incompetence. And yet we had not been able to move them.
Even after the death of Dr Williams in March of 1981 the PNM was returned to power with the largest majority it had ever had. So that there was a sense of almost desperation in the population about the prospect of being saddled forever with the PNM and they demanded and were prepared to support any solution which seemed credible.
The second factor was that in opposition at that time were a group of leaders each of whom had been on the political stage for a long time. Messrs Robinson, Hudson-Phillips, Panday and Best were all possessed of the stature which comes from experience, were all respected even if not supported and all brought significant though different talents to the table.
More than anything else these leaders, taken together, were more than acceptable as legitimate representatives of the main tribes in the country. When therefore the NAR was put together it had, from the moment of its birth, credibility and legitimacy and it presented a solution to the burning question of the day.
So while we watch the dance let us ask ourselves the following two questions. First: what is the burning issue which faces the electorate in 2009? And second: how will an opposition coalition party be so structured as to convince us that it fairly represents all the tribes?
