CONVENIENT ALLIANCE?

With the formal announcement by Prime Minister Patrick Manning in the House on Wednesday of a January 17 date for the Tobago House of Assembly (THA) elections NAR Tobago leader, Cecil Caruth, has hinted at an election alliance of his Party with the Democratic Action Congress (DAC), while the United National Congress (UNC) is still to decide on contesting. Despite the lack of certainty of the UNC, implied in a statement by Party Political Leader, Basdeo Panday, that the UNC had not yet decided whether or not to contest, the reality of the country’s political situation may force it to field candidates. Should the UNC, Trinidad and Tobago’s official Opposition in the House of Representatives, decide to remain aloof from the THA elections this may be viewed as ruling it out from having the right to have itself seen as a national party.

Should it, however, decide to contest it would do so without any alliance with NAR Tobago which has publicly ruled this out charging that the UNC’s, involvement in the 2001 THA elections had caused it (the NAR) to lose in some constituencies it felt it otherwise would have won. Caruth, who advanced this argument did not bother to explain when he or his Party arrived at this conclusion, bearing in mind that, ironically, the UNC and the NAR reached an accommodation with respect to the 2002 General Election! Did Caruth mean, for example, that many persons who either voted for the majority Party, the People’s National Movement, and/or for the United National Congress would have cast their ballots for the National Alliance for Reconstruction Tobago had the UNC opted out of the 2001 THA elections? Did he arrive at this conclusion before or after the results of the 2002 General Election in which the PNM won both parliamentary seats in Tobago as well as control of the House of Representatives?

Meanwhile, NAR Tobago appears to have opted for another electoral partner this time around, the Democratic Action Congress, with Caruth’s statement to a Newsday reporter that he did not rule out the possibility of an alliance between his Party and the DAC. Alliances have been part of the political landscape of Trinidad and Tobago from since 1957 when three parties, today extinct — the People’s Democratic Party, the Trinidad Labour Party and the Party of Political Progress Groups — joined to form the (Trinidad) Democratic Labour Party (DLP) to fight the PNM in the 1958 Federal Elections. It is history that the DLP defeated the PNM six votes to four. A successful alliance would be repeated 28 years later, this time in the General Election of 1986, when four political parties — the Organisation for National Reconstruction, the United Labour Front, the Democratic Action Congress and Tapia House — merged and formed the National Alliance for Reconstruction. The NAR won the General Election 33-3.

Certain questions arise, however, with respect to the possibility of an alliance between NAR Tobago and the DAC, albeit for the Tobago House of Assembly elections, particularly as the alliances which evolved into mergers for the contesting of the 1958 and 1986 elections had both been initiated more than a year before each of the elections. Would the NAR Tobago and the DAC, should a merger take place, have enough time between now and December 23, when candidates will be announced, to reach common ground? This, bearing in mind that the DAC represents a group which broke away from the NAR to reform one of the national Party’s 1986 constitutents. Or will any alliance between NAR Tobago and its splinter group, the resurrected DAC, be an alliance of convenience between the two groups? Whatever the answer, the January 17 THA elections promises not merely to be interesting but may be a pointer to the next Trinidad and Tobago General Election, constitutionally due in 2007.