Well, surprise surprise, days to go and the PNM suddenly looks good compared to the other team. Any number could play, but the PNM has gained traction these last few weeks with its fresh young faces, its leader who now has his story straight and pose perfected, and its narrative: we'll save you with youth and integrity. (D�j� vu much?)
Meanwhile, the UNC's advantage has evaporated through stupidity (like the PM putting her social secretary in a safe seat), but it's had help. The help has come in that peculiar UNC phenomenon, the kamikaze campaign–where the candidate has no chance of winning but works to block the UNC/PP. Like Team Unity in 2002.
The present kamikaze/ILP campaign is led by the ever-resourceful Mr Jack Warner, whose revelations get ever more desperate and actionable. He's already lost libel suits to the former AG and others. And from the number of pre-action protocol letters flying, more will follow. But after the election. For now, mission accomplished: the leader looks damaged, unable to control the malevolent forces around her.
And the PNM's cake has been iced by last-minute defections by Gypsy and Dave Persad, a former PP insider who's been appearing on PNM platforms with stories of nepotism, rampant corruption and fraud. This too appears to be part of the UNC process: disgruntled insiders turning on the party, with a startling and disproportionate animus. The best example is Trevor Sudama et al who defected to the PNM after the election in 2001. Mr Panday in 2007 campaigned against the COP, leaving the PNM free to canter over the finish line.
The theme here is a personal, almost nihilistic spite in the PP/UNC (and its previous incarnations from the DLP onward), a major factor that kept the Opposition divided and the PNM in power from 1961. There have been PNM defections, but they carry nowhere near the venom of the UNC defectors.
The late Mr Ken Valley went on CNC3 before the 2007 elections to warn the public about Mr Manning's PNM. But even then, he asked that voters not give the PNM a constitutional majority. Dr Rowley, at a meeting in Diego Martin before the 2010 election, when he was not so high in the firmament, campaigned against his own party and leader without trying to inflict the kind of damage the former UNCites and are doing.
As election predictions are tiresome, it might be interesting to digress to explore this difference. Undergraduate sociology provides the concepts of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft; social typologies which explain the different political natures of the PNM and UNC.
PNM (Gesellschaft) politics are associational, based on artificial social structures, like bureaucracies, civic organisations and political parties. The PNM, rooted in the urban proletariat, brought many different people (classes, originating from different islands and so on) together under the premise of a unifying ethnic nationalism as an entr�e to modernity/independence.
The relation PNMites have with the party is passionate but fundamentally impersonal. Not to deny the streak of cultishness ("PNM till ah dead") but for PNMites, especially post-Williams, the party is a thing outside them.
The Gemeinschaft, by contrast, characteristic of a peasant society, is based on tradition and social relations which have "always" existed, like the religious beliefs. Hence the necessity for Mr Panday to establish himself as an uber-Brahmin, and Mrs Persad-Bissessar to make nice with the Maha Sabha. In the Gemeinschaft, there is no separation between church, state and politics.
Of course it's more complicated than that, but the point is, this is a fundamental difference between the political worldviews of the political parties, which apparently has eluded political analysts and sociologists and the parties themselves, but explains the behaviour. But if it clarifies the parties qua parties, it doesn't explain why both behave identically when they're in power.
My best guess is they're still infected with the old postcolonial malaise–still pursuing infantile rebellion, and seeking reparation for hurts real and imagined, via theft and anarchy. The society should have faced and defused this by now, but the mass emigration of the last generation robbed the society of a necessary intellectual element.
While the faint outlines of a black clerisy persist, not so for the Indians. Before Independence, there were Indo literary magazines, debating societies and cultural organisations. There existed an Indo class equivalent to the Afro Saxons: cultured, intelligent and accomplished. Many of them were attracted to the PNM till 1958 ("hostile and recalcitrant" etc). The majority of them then decamped, leaving the peasantry which has admittedly done well for itself in some ways, and which is what we see in the UNC.
In the last five years, we've seen the character of our Gemeinschaft: crude, rapacious, ostentatious, with little capacity or desire to understand the whole. Much of what I've heard of the PP in power is its xenophobia, its purging bright people from ministries and state institutions, and its rapacity–treating the state coffers like reparations, almost. (I wonder where they got that idea from?) The implosions of today are a direct consequence of that myopia.
Which brings us back to the real world. The forex shortages, endless allegations of nepotism and compromising of institutions like the EMA, Town and Country; traffic; a gelded police service; the murderous health sector; the snowballing anything-goes dystopia everywhere. Can we survive another five years of this?
Of course we can. But it won't be fun. And the looming PNM won't be any better, and perhaps worse, having learned a thing or two from the incumbents. But it'll be interesting to see how long it takes for the smiley PNM exteriors to dissolve to show us what's underneath.