Gail Alexan­der

Ac­cus­ing the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress of be­ing self-serv­ing and pre­sent­ing leg­is­la­tion to pre­vent its im­mi­nent gen­er­al elec­tion de­feat, Row­ley said the run-off poll could pre­vent the Pres­i­dent from ap­point­ing a prime min­is­ter and suc­cess­ful can­di­dates and a de­feat­ed prime min­is­ter and gov­ern­ment might have to stay in of­fice un­til any re­quired run-off is done.He warned that in the in­ter­im 15-day pe­ri­od, a de­feat­ed gov­ern­ment with ac­cess to Trea­sury funds could go in­to tar­get­ed con­stituen­cies and try to sway votes in its favour.

He claimed 25 gov­ern­ment projects were done in St Joseph to aid Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship can­di­date Ian Al­leyne in last year's by-elec­tion.Row­ley said: "But they are now putting in­to law to al­low at the end of an elec­tion that they can do that. All they have to do is file an elec­tion pe­ti­tion, ob­struct com­ple­tion of an elec­tion in the sec­ond run-off and go to court and use their bat­tery of lawyers to drag it out and re­main in of­fice."

A run-off will al­so clear out of the way small­er par­ties, like the In­de­pen­dent Lib­er­al par­ty (ILP) and Con­gress of the Peo­ple (COP), who were sec­ond and third, he said.Since the pro­pos­al could see de­feat­ed MPs re­main­ing in of­fice un­til a run-off is held, the sit­u­a­tion could lead to dis­tur­bance of the peace and good or­der, Row­ley said, and Sec­tion 53 of the Con­sti­tu­tion stat­ed Par­lia­ment must make laws for peace and good or­der.

Con­sid­er­ing the neg­a­tive po­ten­tial of the run-off poll–pos­si­ble breach of the peace–he said the ini­tia­tive would re­quire a spe­cial two-thirds ma­jor­i­ty for pas­sage, which the Gov­ern­ment didn't have, and not a sim­ple ma­jor­i­ty as it said."This Gov­ern­ment is lay­ing the foun­da­tion so that when it is de­feat­ed for there not to be a peace­ful and qui­et trans­fer of pow­er in T&T," he ar­gued.He gave an­oth­er ex­am­ple of de­feat­ed MPs hav­ing to stay in of­fice and pass a bud­get while they await­ed run-off polls.

"I ask all the peo­ple of T&T, if you be­lieve Sec­tion 53 on peace and good or­der is im­por­tant and the po­ten­tial for po­lit­i­cal in­sta­bil­i­ty could dam­age T&T, re­ject all the blan­d­ish­ments of the gov­ern­ment spokesper­sons and fo­cus on the po­ten­tial of this run-off to cre­ate dan­ger­ous in­sta­bil­i­ty," he added.