Indications have grown stronger that the ruling United Democratic Party (UDP) will call general elections for the same day on which municipal elections are scheduled – March 7.
Apart from supporting Mark Espat and Cordel Hyde, who are the Opposition People’s United Party (PUP) Albert and Lake Independence area representatives, this newspaper will not take sides in the elections.
Belize is a small country, Belize City a small place, and it is so easy for healthy rivalries to degenerate into personal vendettas. Electoral politics is a game which has no rules on the ground. Yes, there are libel laws, but local politicians almost never resorted to them until after our political independence in 1981. After political independence, plaintiffs who were in office could sue for libel in Belize and not have to worry about “other matters” arising during the course of the trial. During colonial days, and everybody knew everybody else’s business in little British Honduras, local politicians knew that if they sued for libel on one thing, something else might arise in court which would be even more damaging to their reputations.
The discourse in politics here became quite bitter after the split in the PUP in 1956. The PUP had ruled politics in British Honduras after its birth in 1950 as a roots organization, so that it was not until it became a case, in a sense, of PUP versus PUP, that things really began to heat up and become vicious in political party newspapers and on the public rostrums. The PUP’s domestic opponents between 1950 and 1956 had been relatively intimidated.
After 1961, the George Price-led PUP became overpowering, and it was not until the birth of the UDP in 1973 that a serious electoral challenge to the PUP emerged. Whereas the politics of the 1960’s had been dominated by the Guatemalan issue, and featured the personality clash between the PUP’s George Price and the NIP’s Philip Goldson, who was a former PUP official, the coming of the UDP introduced ideology into the political debate.
It was clear that the early UDP was pro-business and pro-free market capitalism, whereas the ruling PUP insisted on the prominent role of government in development economics, what Mr. Price referred to as the “mixed economy.” There was the belief by some in Belize’s business sector that the two general election candidates introduced by the PUP in the 1974 general elections, Assad Shoman in Cayo North and Said Musa in Fort George, wanted to push Mr. Price towards communism.
Today, for the 2012 general elections, the ideological roles of the two major parties have essentially been reversed. It is the Dean Barrow UDP which is now insisting on government’s role in the economy as part of its “pro-poor” initiatives, while the PUP is appealing to business interests on the grounds that Mr. Barrow has become a “dictator” and that he is anti-business.
The worldwide economic downturn which began roughly five years ago has forced Belizeans to tighten their belts. Some early PUP election propaganda is asking voters if they are better off today than they were in 2008. The UDP will counter that the “growth economics” of the Musa administration was seriously flawed because the cost was astronomical – the dreaded “super bond.”
Where replacement of the Musa government was concerned, it is obvious, and especially in retrospect, that the die was cast when the trade unions took to the streets en masse in early 2005. From there, it has been all downhill politically for the PUP. It is surprising to us that the PUP have not been able to win back the trade union support they enjoyed, absolutely, from their birth in 1950 until political independence in 1981. Remember now, the PUP was built on the rock-solid foundation of a trade union – the General Workers Union (GWU).
On another note, one of the models we have used to analyze election campaigns, since the coming of the 18-year-old vote in 1978, is the “youth model.” If we see a party as having a decided edge where the youth are concerned, and this could be because of one or two charismatic candidates, then the “youth” party wins. Hence, in the youth model, Assad and Said provided the youth edge for the PUP in 1979; Dean and Derek did the same for the UDP in 1984; and Glenn Godfrey was the youth edge for the PUP in 1989. The PUP should theoretically have the youth edge for 2012 because their new leader, Francis Fonseca, is quite a bit younger than Prime Minister Barrow, but Francis would need to shatter the suspicion that Said and Ralph pull his strings.
If Amandala were not as established as it is, we would have to support a second term for the UDP because of the two years of the National Perspective. An element in the PUP configuration spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on that newspaper in an attempt to smear the name of this newspaper’s publisher, among others.
It would have been easy for us to assume the NP’s financing came from Lord Ashcroft, just as it would have been easy for us to assume in February of 1998 that it was the ruling UDP which tried to take down our Belize City radio tower. The easy assumption, however, is not our way. The modern Belize is a place where things are not always as they seem.
This brings us back to the upcoming elections. Our sources feel that the UDP presently have more safe seats than the PUP. What 1993 proved, however, was that you can look sure to win one day, and lose narrowly the next. The voters of Belize are cynical and they are sophisticated. There are fewer sure things in Belize than ever before. Buckle up, Rasta, and try to enjoy the ride.
All power to the people.