Gail Alexan­der

De­spite los­ing in Mon­day's Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment poll, the small­er po­lit­i­cal par­ties in­tend to con­tin­ue on their own–and they don't see the out­come as favour­ing ei­ther the PNM or UNC.

The views came from the lead­ers of the Con­gress of the Peo­ple (COP), Na­tion­al Sol­i­dar­i­ty As­sem­bly (NSA) and oth­ers re­gard­ing Mon­day's elec­tion re­sult where the PNM won sev­en cor­po­ra­tions, drop­ping one from its 2013 gain of eight, while the UNC held its six, get­ting back sev­er­al seats and they tied in San­gre Grande.

COP lost all seats the par­ty con­test­ed, re­ceiv­ing an es­ti­mat­ed 360 votes. The Elec­tions and Bound­aries Com­mis­sion yes­ter­day stat­ed it could not give fi­nal fig­ures as yet.

COP leader Dr Anirudh Ma­habir said, "The glar­ing fact is, so few peo­ple came out to vote, it seems so many didn't want to. It prob­a­bly means the two ma­jor par­ties and COP al­so failed to bring the peo­ple out, even though PNM and UNC spent mil­lions.

"But the UNC has got­ten a boost from its re­sults. It sur­prised us they did so well and that we did so bad­ly. We cam­paigned in their heart­land so we were ca­su­al­ties of their con­sol­i­dat­ed vote. It 's an in­dict­ment on the PNM; they spent so many mil­lions and were un­able to get peo­ple to come out."

Ma­habir said COP is yet to de­cide what will hap­pen with its fu­ture, "but we'll re­main on our own. We've stamped our pres­ence in cer­tain ar­eas. If we hadn't par­tic­i­pat­ed, we'd have been left out of the pol­i­tics for­ev­er.

"I don't think we need to unite. If we were go­ing to be part­ners with UNC again we might as well fold up and be­come UNC. We can­not be a sec­ondary part­ner and be sub­sumed by UNC 's might–we'll for­ev­er be beg­ging for seats."

How­ev­er, Ma­habir agreed the COP was al­ready sub­sumed by UNC votes in Mon­day's poll.

"We have to re­think our po­si­tion but so many didn't come out to vote, re­ject­ing UNC and PNM. So there's still space for COP.

"Many still feel they want some­thing oth­er than the two par­ties. COP may or may not be that or maybe a new par­ty or some­thing dif­fer­ent may work. We in­tend to par­tic­i­pate in what­ev­er comes up."

For­mer COP leader Prakash Ra­mad­har, in Lon­don, said he had not seen the re­sults.