The Opposition People’s United Party (PUP) marks its 60th year of existence on Wednesday, September 29, 2010; and while it is the longest standing political party in Belize and among the longest standing in the region and the world, according to deputy leader Mark Espat, this is a time when the party has to take a serious look in the mirror and ask what it is doing wrong.
“We are in a deep electoral hole,” said Espat, pointing to five consecutive defeats by the ruling United Democratic Party since 2006. The UDP has beaten the PUP in village council elections, municipal elections and general elections. “We are not going to get out of that hole by pretending that everything is okay,” he later added.
According to Espat, the Opposition PUP is 11 or 12 percentage points behind the UDP. The UDP won the municipal elections in 2009 by a plurality of 60% for the first time, he added.
“There are some people who I would call the pendulum addicts,” said Espat. “They believe that all we have to do is just wait and the people are going to tire of the current government and they are going to come back to us.”
He said, however, that the Opposition has to prove itself to be worthy and come up with serious plans that would inspire voters.
“The time is right for a reawakening and re-energizing of the party,” Espat added with optimism.
He has conceded that the Opposition is not fulfilling its constitutional role and needs to do much more work to present itself as a credible and viable alternative to the UDP. The PUP has not been as effective an Opposition as they need to be, Espat declared.
It is no secret that the party has suffered five consecutive defeats starting with municipals in 2006, the village council elections 2007, general elections of course in 2008, and then the cycle started again with municipals ‘09 and village councils this year, said Espat.
“Any institution, any political party that suffers that number of consecutive setbacks has to look in the mirror and ask what we have been doing wrong,” he added.
“The PUP is falling far short of the bar of readiness,” he also opined.
Espat said that two and a half years is more than enough time for the Barrow Administration to have delivered in a meaningful way on its manifesto promises, including offering Belizeans shares in a national oil company; he thinks the UDP government has not delivered on many of their promises and “…a growing number of voters are becoming disillusioned.”
“I believe that the ball is in our court,” said Espat. “We need to get our act together.”
The PUP’s democracy has not sufficiently evolved, the deputy leader indicated. He used the example of the UK’s Labor Party, which recently chose Ed Miliband as its new leader. There were 60 debates and four rounds of voting for four months, Espat pointed out. This rigid and democratic process allows the best man or woman to emerge, he added.
“PUP politics is not what some people think it is. What people feel on main street is not necessarily what flies at Independence Hall, so to speak,” Espat said, when asked if he would ever throw his hat in the ring for leadership of the PUP.
Since the last week of August, there has been a divide in the upper ranks of the Opposition, over the process that party leader Johnny Briceño has engaged to hold the party’s national convention, slated for October 17. At that convention, there will be no contest to Briceño’s leadership, since no other name was submitted before the close of nominations on Monday, September 13.
Espat was among four PUP parliamentarians who wrote Briceño on September 15, 2010, calling for a series of reforms and availing themselves to fill the posts of deputies should those reforms be pursued. The other men were Florencio Marin, Jr. representative of Corozal Southeast; Freetown representative Francis Fonseca and Lake I representative Cordel Hyde.
Espat, who said that the process for selecting a new executive was never ensured to be “free and fair”—indicated that they have not heard a believable reason yet why the convention has been moved up from its November date. “It was clear that there was an attempt to rig this process,” said Espat.
Since the divide over the October convention, communications with the party leader has been reduced to text messaging, as the parties had reportedly not spoken face-to-face for more than a month, Espat confirmed on Tuesday.
This is about the PUP being election-ready and a viable credible alternative to the UDP, he added. One of the problems Espat cited is the lack of transparency in campaign financing. Belize has no laws to address this, and until that is transparent, he said, people would not be able to hold party decisions to account.
He also pointed out that constituencies need to be strengthened with “know how” and “best practices” in order to offer viable candidacies.
Fonseca, Hyde and Espat have asked their leader to include Marin on the party’s executive, as he is the only one of the six parliamentarians who does not yet have an executive seat. (Briceño has told us separately that he had previously been in discussions with Marin to bring him on-board.)
Espat noted that Marin was one of the few who “…survived the red tide, the red tsunami of 2008,” when the UDP won a supermajority of seats in the House of Representatives.
During the former PUP administrations, the area representative pointed out, there were many success stories—but there were also huge scandals. Among those he cited were the Universal Health Services deal, the diversion of the Venezuela funds and the abuse at the Development Finance Corporation. Espat said that the PUP has done a poor job of squaring those issues away with the voters, and the ghosts of the past have not yet been exorcised.
Some in the PUP are apparently still in denial, he demonstrated, as they think that the voters were wrong and don’t understand the issues, and that they made a terrible mistake in voting out the PUP. “The voters can never be wrong,” Espat commented.
He also said that he does not subscribe to the theory of infallibility, nor does he subscribe to the labels of “old PUP” versus “new PUP.”
Espat, who recalled that their party was born out of a people’s movement with the now defunct General Workers Union (GWU), said that he hopes sometime soon they can have one PUP committed to change, looking forward and learning the lessons, especially those coming out of the tumultuous period of 2004 to 2008.
Many Belizeans are looking for a new PUP, said Espat, but for him, that does not mean tossing out all the old leaders, as he himself was a member of the Cabinet and an elected rep in 1998, 2003, and again in 2008.
He recollected that 49,000 Belizeans voted for their party in the 2008 general elections. This, we note, represented 40.88% of votes cast.
With municipals due in 2012 and general elections by 2013, he held off on making any predictions of how those political battles will play out, but only ventured to say that 2013 will be very difficult to win.
(Story based on the Tuesday, September 28, 2010 edition of “The Adele Ramos Show.” PUP Leader Johnny Briceño is scheduled to appear on the same show on Tuesday, October 12.)