Con­gress of the Peo­ple (COP) po­lit­i­cal leader Car­olyn Seep­er­sad-Bachan has claimed that the par­ty has re­gained much of the sup­port which it had when it was first launched over a decade ago. 

Seep­er­sad-Bachan made the state­ment while ad­dress­ing sup­port­ers at the launch of the par­ty’s new of­fice at the cor­ner of Evans and Jack­son Streets in Curepe, on Sun­day. 

Seep­er­sad-Bachan said: “We are see­ing a re­turn of the core COP mem­bers which stood with us in 2007.” 

In the 2007 gen­er­al elec­tion, the COP earned the ac­co­lade of se­cur­ing the most votes by a third po­lit­i­cal par­ty since In­de­pen­dence. Al­though the par­ty re­ceived 148,041 votes, it did not se­cure a seat in Par­lia­ment. 

Seep­er­sad-Bachan ad­mit­ted that the par­ty had made po­lit­i­cal mis­takes in the past, but claimed that it had learned from them, to en­sure that they are not re­peat­ed. 

“It is about look­ing at er­rors we have made, the mis­takes we have made and where we went wrong and fix­ing those mis­takes for the fu­ture. That is the on­ly way we can make progress in our coun­try,” Seep­er­sad-Bachan said. 

She said that her par­ty was firm­ly com­mit­ted to par­tic­i­pa­to­ry gov­er­nance where cit­i­zens have a greater say in the work of the Gov­ern­ment. 

“Our peo­ple are ready to take that charge. The Con­gress of the Peo­ple is the on­ly place where that would take place, not the oth­er par­ties,” Seep­er­sad-Bachan said. 

In his ad­dress at the event, COP found­ing mem­ber and for­mer po­lit­i­cal leader Win­ston Dook­er­an said the par­ty’s sym­bol “Cir­cle of Cir­cles” tru­ly re­flect­ed the par­ty’s ide­ol­o­gy of in­clu­siv­i­ty. 

“The sym­bol is re­al­ly the re­flec­tion of the phi­los­o­phy that led to the for­ma­tion of this par­ty, which is to bring all con­stituent units of this coun­try to­geth­er as one whole,” Dook­er­an said. 

He claimed that the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM)’s “Bal­isi­er flower” was a sym­bol of self-rule and the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC)’s “Ris­ing Sun” was meant to cre­ate a new hope in a di­vid­ed so­ci­ety, and that both had lost rel­e­vance in to­day’s so­ci­ety. 

“What you have in this par­ty is a sym­bol that lasts for­ev­er,” Dook­er­an said. 

The COP’s new of­fice is the third to be re­cent­ly opened, af­ter oth­ers were launched in Ed­in­burgh, Ch­agua­nas, and Arou­ca. A fourth is ex­pect­ed to be opened in the San Juan/Barataria con­stituen­cy in the com­ing weeks. 

The par­ty in­tends to con­test all elec­toral dis­tricts in the lo­cal gov­ern­ment polls on De­cem­ber 2. It has not an­nounced which con­stituen­cies it will present can­di­dates for in the gen­er­al elec­tion next year.