The re­turn of Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar to the of­fice of Prime Min­is­ter will ush­er in what could be termed Kam­la 2.0, in which she is like­ly to gov­ern very dif­fer­ent­ly from how she gov­erned in her first term.

She made it pel­lu­cid­ly clear on the cam­paign trail that she had purged the UNC of class, caste, ca­bal, tribe, dy­nasty, etc, and that this in­car­na­tion of the UNC was go­ing to be very dif­fer­ent.

Her choice of John Je­re­mie as At­tor­ney Gen­er­al has set the tone for what Kam­la 2.0 is go­ing to look like. A for­mer mem­ber of the PNM join­ing a UNC gov­ern­ment re­calls Ralph Maraj and Bri­an Kuei Tung leav­ing the first Man­ning ad­min­is­tra­tion (1991-1995) and be­ing ap­point­ed un­der the Pan­day regime of 1995-2001.

In some re­spects, it was a move re­sem­bling Don­ald Trump’s em­brace of promi­nent De­moc­rats like Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tul­si Gab­bard to be in his Cab­i­net.

The cre­ation of a coali­tion of in­ter­ests by Per­sad-Bisses­sar has ush­ered in a new­er ver­sion of the UNC in pow­er. This has been con­struct­ed on her terms, as she faced head­winds from in­side the par­ty from peo­ple who tried to wrest the Na­tion­al Ex­ec­u­tive away from her in June 2024 and failed.

That ef­fort made her stronger as her slate emerged vic­to­ri­ous, and the UNC was en­er­gised as a con­se­quence of it. It was pre­cise­ly that kind of en­er­gis­ing that the PNM failed to copy when they can­celled their in­ter­nal elec­tions last year in favour of a top-down process that im­posed a prime min­is­ter on the gov­ern­ment and left the of­fice of po­lit­i­cal leader un­touched.

All of that is now wa­ter un­der the bridge, as the PNM chose a leader of the Op­po­si­tion af­ter the par­ty had en­tered the gen­er­al elec­tion cam­paign with two lead­ers–a po­lit­i­cal leader (Dr Row­ley) and a prime min­is­ter (Stu­art Young).

The threat of le­gal ac­tion against the ap­point­ment of Young as PM by the Op­po­si­tion pri­or to his ap­point­ment was de­signed to en­sure that their hubris would make them ac­tu­al­ly go through with the Young ap­point­ment which was a gift to the UNC.

Kam­la 2.0 has emerged out of the ash­es of a failed po­lit­i­cal strat­e­gy by the PNM to (i) have Row­ley re­placed as PM with­out him si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly step­ping down as po­lit­i­cal leader, (ii) put the PNM in a po­si­tion to cam­paign for re-elec­tion with two lead­ers, and (iii) dis­solve Par­lia­ment one day af­ter Young was ap­point­ed PM.

The UNC coali­tion of in­ter­ests re­shaped the elec­tion cam­paign as the work­ing class ver­sus the priv­i­leged class. That con­fig­u­ra­tion al­lowed Per­sad-Bisses­sar to ditch the al­le­ga­tions of racial pol­i­tics that had been made against her and opened the door to her state­ment that she had purged the par­ty. The em­brace of for­mer po­lit­i­cal en­e­mies has al­lowed her to re­shape the po­lit­i­cal di­a­logue by ton­ing down the rhetoric that had be­come crude and rude.

The UNC no longer had what Row­ley used to crass­ly call “imps, pimps and chimps”. The change of vo­cab­u­lary away from the cru­di­ty of the Row­ley era will be a wel­come de­vel­op­ment. Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s ad­dress at Pres­i­dent’s House re­vealed a new tone based on love and in­clu­sion that had not been heard for ten years. The rude boy im­age has now been re­placed by the ma­ter­nal love im­age.

That is quite a qual­i­ta­tive shift, and the term “Aun­ty Kams” has now emerged as a pop­u­lar one in the po­lit­i­cal di­a­logue. Un­der­neath all of that will be a rag­ing tor­rent of hard­core po­lit­i­cal bat­tle in which the ex­ter­nal hu­man frail­ties of the new Prime Min­is­ter, which she ac­knowl­edged pub­licly at the last ral­ly of the UNC two Sat­ur­days ago, will not be an im­ped­i­ment to her mind and in­tel­lect, which is what got her back to White­hall in the first place.

The warn­ing that she is­sued to her MPs and all po­ten­tial ap­pointees of her gov­ern­ment echoed her track record in her first term, where she re­moved min­is­ters with im­puni­ty. This time, she has cho­sen to em­pha­sise the treat­ment of peo­ple as a core el­e­ment of Kam­la 2.0, and her gov­ern­ment mem­bers have all been warned.

In­ter­est­ing­ly, the way that the UNC treat­ed her af­ter she lost two gen­er­al elec­tions (2015 and 2020) stands in stark con­trast to the way in which the PNM treat­ed Patrick Man­ning when he lost in 2010 and the Kei­th Row­ley/Stu­art Young dual lead­er­ship team of 2025 when they lost.

She was on­ly able to re­turn to pow­er in one of the great­est po­lit­i­cal come­backs in our his­to­ry be­cause she was re-elect­ed po­lit­i­cal leader of the UNC in 2015, 2017, 2020 and 2022. The next elec­tion for the po­lit­i­cal leader of the UNC is due in June this year.

Prof Hamid Ghany is a Pro­fes­sor of Con­sti­tu­tion­al Af­fairs and Par­lia­men­tary Stud­ies at The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI). He was al­so ap­point­ed an Hon­orary Pro­fes­sor of The UWI up­on his re­tire­ment in Oc­to­ber 2021. He con­tin­ues his re­search and pub­li­ca­tions and al­so does some teach­ing at The UWI.