Tony Rakhal-Fras­er,

“Ball of con­fu­sion, that’s what the world is to­day ... round and round we go, where the world’s head­ed no­body knows ... peo­ple all over the world are shout­ing end the war ... and the band plays on.” Temp­ta­tions...1970s...an his­toric pe­ri­od of re­volt and hope.

I am choos­ing to in­ter­pret the re­sults of three ma­jor elec­tions in­ter­na­tion­al­ly over the last month in the USA, Is­rael and Ser­bia as il­lus­tra­tions of vot­er dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the qual­i­ty of gov­er­nance re­ceived and the con­tin­u­ing search for a new world of po­lit­i­cal func­tion­ing.

I have pre­vi­ous­ly il­lus­trat­ed such a poli­ty us­ing the ex­am­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go, that is, that elec­tors are dis­sat­is­fied with the per­for­mance of gov­ern­ments and so they keep mov­ing them in and out in the hope, and with­out op­tions, that a learn­ing ex­pe­ri­ence in op­po­si­tion can as­sist to pro­duce a bet­ter qual­i­ty per­for­mance.

One month short of two years since tak­ing of­fice, the Amer­i­can elec­torate has un­cer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly swept Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s Re­pub­li­can par­ty in­to the op­po­si­tion in the Con­gress and the Sen­ate. And while Trump may claim that he was not on the bal­lot in the elec­tion, the un­de­ni­able fact is that his gov­er­nance, his poli­cies and pro­grammes, lo­cal­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, were the is­sues up­on which the elec­torate vot­ed.

Trump’s con­tin­u­ous boast­ing of his “nev­er be­fore seen” achieve­ments, in­clud­ing the bil­lions and bil­lions brought in by his tar­iff im­po­si­tions. His of­fer of a US$5,000 in­cen­tive/bribe to elec­tors to vote, his re­peat­ed claims of over­whelm­ing war suc­cess against Iran, and his kid­nap­ping of Venezue­lan pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro and the con­trol of that coun­try’s oil re­serves were all part of his gov­er­nance record over the 18 months of his pres­i­den­cy.

To com­pound the mad­den­ing ir­rel­e­vance of Pres­i­dent Trump, he spent the morn­ing af­ter the elec­tion, drawn to the site of his Grand Ball­room built to daz­zle and en­ter­tain the cap­i­tal­ist elite of Amer­i­can so­ci­ety.

It is yet an­oth­er ex­am­ple of how far politi­cians can be from the re­al­i­ty of the liv­ing, suf­fer­ing, the am­bi­tions and hopes dashed by gov­er­nance fail­ures and why they have been shift­ing them in­to and out of of­fice.

In con­trast to Trump and the Re­pub­li­can par­ty’s im­plo­sion af­ter a short stay in gov­ern­ment, is the 30-year stint of Bibi Ne­tanyahu’s Likud par­ty in Is­rael. There, the enor­mi­ty of the con­se­quences of an elec­torate re­fus­ing to give the ab­solute ma­jor­i­ty re­quired to the in­cum­bent has to be judged on the life-and-death is­sues at stake for the Jew­ish elec­torate.

Giv­en Ne­tanyahu’s record of deal­ing bru­tal­ly with any chal­lenge to Jew­ish/Zion­ist su­prema­cy in Is­rael, he could have been ex­pect­ed to eas­i­ly re­ceive the ma­jor­i­ty re­quired to hold on to of­fice as the pro­tec­tor of the Jew­ish state.

But notwith­stand­ing that deep re­liance on Ne­tanyahu and his Likud par­ty to elim­i­nate what is con­sid­ered the gen­er­a­tional night­mare of an Arab/Mus­lim “ter­ror­ist” at­tempt to thwart the hope of the cre­ation of a “Greater Is­rael”, the elec­torate chose not to give the ma­jor­i­ty to Ne­tanyahu.

It’s al­so in­ter­est­ing that the elec­toral­ly long-dor­mant Arab-Is­raeli pop­u­la­tion gained the con­fi­dence and de­sire to vote in large num­bers, no doubt the hope be­ing to change the pol­i­tics to win recog­ni­tion of their cit­i­zen­ship in a coun­try they had made their home for over 1000 years be­fore the Nak­ba, the Pales­tin­ian dis­place­ment of 1949.

The most in­ter­est­ing po­lit­i­cal de­vel­op­ment of an elec­torate seek­ing mean­ing­ful rep­re­sen­ta­tion af­ter decades of gov­ern­ments fail­ing to meet their needs oc­curred in Ser­bia, one of the coun­tries cre­at­ed out of the breakup of Gen­er­al Tito’s Yu­goslavia. Tired of the three po­lit­i­cal coali­tions which have been vot­ed in and out of of­fice over the last 25 years, the elec­torate placed in of­fice a loose group­ing of stu­dents and young peo­ple out­side of a tra­di­tion­al po­lit­i­cal par­ty sys­tem to seek qual­i­ty gov­er­nance.

It was, and con­tin­ues to be, an ex­pres­sion of frus­tra­tion and an­noy­ance with the poor rep­re­sen­ta­tion they have re­ceived from the tra­di­tion­al par­ties.

The po­lit­i­cal stale­mate and deep frus­tra­tion with the es­tab­lished par­ty sys­tem and the con­ven­tion­al par­ties and the in­sta­bil­i­ty have been go­ing on in France and Italy for many decades. Ger­many has al­so had reg­u­lar shift­ing around amongst tra­di­tion­al par­ties over the decades. Six prime min­is­ters have been sworn in­to of­fice in Eng­land in ten years.

On the oth­er side, the com­mu­nist states, Chi­na, North Ko­rea and Cu­ba, are of­fi­cial­ly de­scribed as sin­gle-par­ty states. Rus­sia is how­ev­er con­sid­ered a dom­i­nant par­ty state with small par­ties hav­ing lit­tle chance of cap­tur­ing suf­fi­cient seats to win an elec­tion to give the pos­si­bil­i­ty of an­oth­er form of gov­er­nance.

The Chi­nese can boast that the se­vere­ly re­strict­ed po­lit­i­cal sys­tem they have op­er­at­ed since 1949, up­dat­ed on a cou­ple of oc­ca­sions, has re­sult­ed in re­mark­able eco­nom­ic ex­pan­sion and de­vel­op­ment.

As writ­ten about in sev­er­al columns over time, our two-par­ty sys­tem here in Trinidad and To­ba­go is steeped in mo­bil­i­sa­tion and gov­er­nance based on race by the two ma­jor par­ties and has re­sult­ed over time in the con­tin­u­ing fail­ure to achieve a co­he­sive so­ci­ety with a dy­nam­ic po­lit­i­cal par­ty cul­ture.

Tony Rakhal-Fras­er, free­lance jour­nal­ist, for­mer re­porter/cur­rent af­fairs pro­gramme pro­duc­er, and news di­rec­tor at TTT, pro­gramme pro­duc­er, cur­rent af­fairs di­rec­tor at Ra­dio Trinidad, for­mer cor­re­spon­dent for the BBC Caribbean Ser­vice, writer for the As­so­ci­at­ed Press, grad­u­ate of UWI, CARI­MAC, Mona in Mass Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, his­to­ry, pol­i­tics, eco­nom­ics, and from the In­sti­tute of In­ter­na­tion­al Re­la­tions, UWI, St Au­gus­tine.