The Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment gov­ern­ment was vot­ed out of of­fice be­cause of yet an­oth­er fail­ure of a gov­ern­ment to meet the needs and am­bi­tions of the so­ci­ety. That in­abil­i­ty is re­flect­ed in the lack of a con­sis­tent and vi­able ap­proach to ex­pan­sion of the coun­try’s eco­nom­ic base out­side of en­er­gy and the ab­solute fail­ure even to at­ten­u­ate the in­hu­man crim­i­nal­i­ty that has now be­come em­bed­ded in the so­ci­ety.

Yes, I don’t doubt the va­lid­i­ty of the view that PNM sup­port­ers were dis­grun­tled by the high-hand­ed ac­tion of po­lit­i­cal leader Kei­th Row­ley to pre-se­lect Stu­art Young to be­come prime min­is­ter with­out giv­ing par­ty mem­bers an op­por­tu­ni­ty to make their own se­lec­tion, as if a 70-year-old par­ty is in­ca­pable of de­cid­ing who should lead. I con­tend, how­ev­er, that PNM’s sur­ren­der of the elec­tion has to do more with its fail­ing the test of po­lit­i­cal in­de­pen­dence.

It seems quite clear that the stay-away fac­tor by PNM sup­port­ers and those who, while not be­ing hard­core PNM par­ty mem­bers, nev­er­the­less sup­port­ed the par­ty, had at its core to do with the fail­ure in two terms of gov­ern­ment un­der the lead­er­ship of prime min­is­ter Kei­th Row­ley to achieve suc­cess in tack­ling the ma­jor prob­lems of the so­ci­ety and econ­o­my as list­ed above.

But such dis­sat­is­fac­tion is not ex­clu­sive­ly a phe­nom­e­non of PNM gov­ern­ments. A cur­so­ry sur­vey of the his­to­ry of gov­ern­ments be­ing en­thu­si­as­ti­cal­ly vot­ed in­to of­fice and dri­ven out af­ter a term or two re­veals the fun­da­men­tal un­der­ly­ing prob­lems of the poli­ty.

Re­lat­ing to this, the PNM was over­whelm­ing­ly vot­ed in­to of­fice in 2015 with 378,729 votes, win­ning 23 seats. Five years lat­er, the num­ber of votes for the PNM was re­duced to 322,180, and the seats to 22. In 2025, the PNM’s share of the votes de­clined dra­mat­i­cal­ly to 224,414 and 13 seats, a loss of 154,315 votes from the 2015 tal­ly, and with a loss of ten seats, in­clud­ing a cou­ple from the PNM heart­land of Point Fortin and La Brea. Over the same pe­ri­od, the UNC moved its votes up from 290,074 af­ter con­test­ing 28 seats and win­ning 17 in 2015 to 309,654 af­ter con­test­ing 39 sears win­ning19 in 2020 and now earn­ing 335,165 votes af­ter con­test­ing 34 seats and win­ning 26 in 2025, an in­crease of 45,000-odd votes for a nine-seat bonus (EBC).

I make the analy­sis not on­ly based on the da­ta above but al­so on the up-and-down treat­ment of the par­ties by the elec­torate in gov­ern­ment and op­po­si­tion reach­ing back to 1986. Then, in search of a so­lu­tion to the post-In­de­pen­dence PNM gov­ern­ments’ in­abil­i­ty to trans­form the so­ci­ety, poli­ty and econ­o­my, the coali­tion Na­tion­al Al­liance for Re­con­struc­tion scat­tered the in­de­pen­dence par­ty.

How­ev­er, that ex­po­sure of the in­abil­i­ty of the PNM and the Op­po­si­tion DLP, ULF, Tapia, UNC, etc, to solve the prob­lems was first made vis­i­ble by the Na­tion­al Joint Ac­tion Com­mit­tee, in­clu­sive of el­e­ments of the trade union move­ment, in 1970. The deep un­der­ly­ing prob­lems were plas­tered over by the avail­abil­i­ty and spread of large quan­ti­ties of oil and gas dol­lars over a few ad­min­is­tra­tions.

What has not been recog­nised and un­der­stood is that the abil­i­ty to trans­form so­ci­ety, poli­ty and econ­o­my is out­side of the ca­pac­i­ty of the two ma­jors. The fact is that the search by the elec­torate for mean­ing­ful and long-term suc­cess has gone back and forth be­tween the PNM and the UNC (the NAR be­ing a com­bi­na­tion of both), with the bright­est spark for long-term suc­cess of eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion com­ing in the 1991-1995 gov­ern­ment through the de­vel­op­ment of the nat­ur­al gas in­dus­try.

Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar made very good elec­toral use of the dis­en­chant­ment with the fail­ures of the 2015-2025 PNM gov­ern­ments with her very bright and vig­or­ous cam­paign. In so do­ing, she has saved her­self from an ig­no­min­ious po­lit­i­cal end. How­ev­er, she too, even more than the PNM now in op­po­si­tion, has to meet the needs of the pop­u­la­tion for qual­i­ty gov­er­nance, aware of the per­ilous con­di­tion of the so­ci­ety and econ­o­my.

Do­ing so will be far more chal­leng­ing than putting on a grand elec­tion cam­paign in which “half-truths, in­nu­en­dos”, down­right lies and mak­ing un­sub­stan­ti­at­ed promis­es pre­vailed. So too the task of meet­ing the great chal­lenges of the econ­o­my and so­ci­ety, the need for ma­jor con­sti­tu­tion­al trans­for­ma­tion and ad­min­is­tra­tive re­or­gan­i­sa­tion of the state will place great ob­sta­cles be­fore her gov­ern­ment.

The core point I make is that the two po­lit­i­cal par­ties in gov­ern­ment go­ing back decades, in­deed start­ing from the end of colo­nial rule, have failed in crit­i­cal ar­eas of gov­er­nance. They have shown nei­ther the un­der­stand­ing nor the ca­pac­i­ty to take on the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to con­struct a vi­brant, ex­pan­sive econ­o­my and cure the so­cial ills of so­ci­ety which are pil­ing up over every gen­er­a­tion.

The need is to look be­yond the very nar­row frame­work of po­lit­i­cal par­ty op­tions–PNM–UNC. Those par­ties have stuck with the trib­al al­liances notwith­stand­ing the sur­face at­tempts at coali­tions which have been seen as an elec­tion strat­e­gy but have dis­in­te­grat­ed with­in months of be­ing formed and placed in gov­ern­ment.

What is as dis­turb­ing is the in­sub­stan­tial na­ture of the small par­ties and the mul­ti­tude of them that have con­test­ed six to sev­en gen­er­al and lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tions in op­po­si­tion to the PNM and the UNC with­out hope of even com­ing close to win­ning a seat, even at­tract­ing se­ri­ous at­ten­tion from the non-trib­al elec­torate out­side of the two camps. To be con­tin­ued...

Tony Rakhal-Fras­er is a free­lance jour­nal­ist, for­mer re­porter/cur­rent af­fairs pro­gramme host and news di­rec­tor at TTT, pro­gramme pro­duc­er/cur­rent af­fairs di­rec­tor at Ra­dio Trinidad, cor­re­spon­dent for the BBC Caribbean Ser­vice and the As­so­ci­at­ed Press, and grad­u­ate of UWI, CARI­MAC, Mona, and St Au­gus­tine–In­sti­tute of In­ter­na­tion­al Re­la­tions.