The PUP will begin to seek the cause for their overwhelming rejection by the people, and they will seek to assign blame in terms of policies and the personalities who push those policies. Beginning on March 2, the PUP will divide inside between those who, on the one hand, blame Ralph Fonseca, and those who, on the other hand, blame the G-7 (and/or the G-2). Unless the Party Leader, Hon. Said Musa, moves quickly and decisively, the struggle inside the PUP could force early elections.

The results of the March 1 election in Belize City, the nation?s largest population center, establish through the statistics that Marshall Nunez was not a strong mayoral candidate. He received several hundreds of votes fewer than each of the 10 PUP councilor candidates. (On the UDP side, new Mayor, Zenaida Moya, received fewer votes than 6 of the UDP?s councilor candidates.)

The national campaign manager of the PUP is Ralph Fonseca. He is also considered the wealthiest individual within the leadership of the PUP and the one with the most power where the PUP area representatives and standard bearers are concerned.

Where the conduct of the campaign was concerned, Party Leader Said Musa tried to take the campaign on his personal back, and failed. His decision to return Cordel Hyde and Mark Espat to Cabinet was motivated primarily by the party?s need to mobilize for the Belize City municipal elections. The supporters of Mr. Fonseca will argue that these two should have been left out in the cold, but it is ordinarily difficult to blame crew members for the wreck of a ship.

Beginning in 1989, the originally trade-union based PUP began to change into a monetarist party. The monetarist policies were very successful between 1996 and 2003, easily winning six straight elections ? two general and four municipal.

But along with the monetarist policies came financial corruption and waste. The PUP government was abusing the Social Security Board pension funds of Belizean workers, and a scandal broke in the middle of 2004 while the government was raising painful taxes and the economy had begun to contract. That SSB/Intelco scandal precipitated the G-7 Cabinet challenge to Ralph Fonseca, the oligarchical architect of the PUP?s monetarist policies.

The people of Belize, including business groups, trade unions, students and the media, began to demonstrate against the Musa government, and those demonstrations became violent from January to April of 2005. Wednesday, March 1, 2006, was the people?s first electoral opportunity to speak. And they spoke.