ST. GEORGE ‘S, Grenada: Grenadians will soon return to the business to talking about general elections now that a three-week carnival celebration that effectively put the ongoing debate on hold is over.

The island was consumed with talk about likely general elections, which is constitutional due by the second quarter of next year; though many speculate it could be held before the end of the year.

A newspaper report here recently had suggested that Prime Minister Dr Keith Mitchell might be considering announcing the date at a convention of his party sometime soon.

There was no suggested date as to when that convention might be held.

Many here believe that a less than buoyant economy, trade union pressures and unsatisfactory private polling results have forced Prime Minister Mitchell to delay the election date, even though he has been mulling over the issue for more than a year now.

While Grenadians have been busy celebrating carnival, Prime Minister Mitchell has undertaken fund raising trips to the United States, Canada and England to help finance the remainder of the campaign.

At least four parties are expected to contest the general elections when they are called, but the National Democratic Congress of Tillman Thomas is seen as the only one with a chance of challenging the rule of the governing New National Party.

These are the only parties that have identified a full slate of 15 candidates so far.

A decisive element in the upcoming period is likely to be government’s relations with the island’s trade union movement.

The idea of a national strike has been brought forward again after government passed an amendment to the Labour Relations Act during the carnival celebrations that the administration claims was not in dispute, but trade unions say they never agreed to.

The amendment covers the issue of strikes and other industrial action in the essential services sector and according to Labour Minister Lawrence Joseph was not one of the outstanding issues being mediated by the Grenada Conference of Churches.

Trade unionists say they are still not happy with the amendment, and sees it as pat of the administration’s move to crush its influence because, in the words of Chester Humphrey “the movement is the last bastion or organized opposition to the policies of the regime.”

There are also rumblings about ongoing salary negotiations with the Grenada Union of Teachers.

The simmering labor issues are threatening to derail the NNP’s campaign, which it hopes to wage on its achievements in infrastructural developments, the need for continuity and the attempt to tie members of the main opposition to the events of October 1983.

Though its popularity base is believed to have been seriously eroded, many analysts here expect the NNP to be reelected with a substantially reduced majority if general elections are called now.

Issues of corruption and the cost of living still dog the Mitchell administration, and if this year’s calypsoes are anything to go by, the country has taken a strong anti-government tone.

Four of the top five calypsonians in this year’s Dimanche Gras competition won with songs that were bitterly anti-government and very popular with the crowds.

“The house (the ruling party’s symbol) is leaking and its wet, that’s why they ain’t call the election yet,” was among the lines sang by Finley Jeffery, a school teacher calypsonian known as Scholar.


PROVIDED BY CARIBUPDATE.COM