Women battle for COP leadership

This is the first time in our history that we have seen an established political party have an internal election (leadership race) with only women stepping up to the platform.

Nicole Dyer, Carolyn Seepersad- Bachan and Sharon Gopaul are good COP leadership candidates, therefore we must pay attention to the obvious.

Could you imagine if this was intentional and a new party was created for only women? The polling on this phenomenon would be of great interest to political analysts and commentators the world over.

The leadership candidates at the last internal election in 2011 were Prakash Ramadhar, Anil Roberts and Vernon De Lima. It would be interesting to know what would have caused an all-men race to now turn to an all-women race.

We have to wait a while to see the results as the COP internal election has been postponed, due to questions surrounding the membership credibility of one of the candidates.

The COP has an uphill task of creating a resurgence, to regain the groundswell it once achieved when Winston Dookeran was leader and before it entered the United National Congress (UNC) partnership.

It can be argued that its credibility faded into disappointment by the population when, after losing one election in 2007, the party formed a partnership with the UNC to win the 2010 election. During the partnership, then leader Ramadhar allowed the COP to be subsumed into the UNC, which eventually gained the COP an unofficial title of “Congress of the Person.” Many former UNC members who went across to the COP then went back home to the UNC between 2010 to 2015. Will the COP re-enter a partnership with the UNC before the next general election? After following the interviews leading up to the publicised internal election, only one candidate gave a straight answer, saying “No.” The population looks on as this COP leadership race is determined sometime in the near future.

May the best candidate win.

RONALD HUGGINS St Joseph