Editorial | Tasks at hand for Mark Golding

The People’s National Party (PNP) can be sanguine that it emerged from last week’s leadership contest relatively unscathed, or at least, without the open wounds left by recent leadership races, including Peter Bunting’s attempt 14 months ago to oust the now departed leader, Peter Phillips.

The relative calm of this contest, we suspect, was as much the effect of a jadedness and despondency in the party after its humiliation in September’s general election, as much as it was the result of the efforts by the contestants, Mark Golding and Lisa Hanna, to rein in their surrogates. Mr Golding, a lawyer, and, until his election, the shadow finance minister, won the election with 1,740 votes, approximately 55 per cent of the amount cast by 3,184 delegates.

The absence of a knock-down, drag out brawl and the balmy post-election statements by Mr Golding and Ms Hanna represent an important first hurdle for the party and Jamaica. But even as we take at face value the sincerity of the declarations, there is much work for Mr Golding to do, including defining what the PNP, under his leadership, stands for and it will offer the Jamaican people.

A first step towards this, Mr Golding suggested, will be “authentic communication” with Ms Hanna on party unity. “We need to have a process that brings everybody together,” he said. “It must be very deliberate and we need to communicate it (the message of unity) right down through the party, from top to the base, that we’re now one family under a big tent.”

Achieving this ideal is important on two fronts. First, with the Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP) 49-14 advantage in Parliament, it is important for Jamaica’s democracy that the PNP regroup to fulfil its constitutional responsibility of holding the administration to account and to be considered a worthy alternative government.

MENDING BIG RENTS

This won’t happen, though, without the PNP mending the big rents in the “big tent” Mr Golding hopes to assemble. In the short term, at least until he has full command of the party, he has to build a coalition with Ms Hanna. For not only was Mr Golding’s victory by less than 10 percentage points not overwhelming, his support, on a cursory review, appears to be regionally skewed, strongest in the central and western parts of the island.

Clearly, Mr Golding will have to determine what story this regional disaggregation of support tells. But more importantly, he has to act quickly on that “authentic communication” with his former rival to ensure that the party rallies behind his leadership instead of sustaining the factionalism of recent years. In this regard, those who voted for Ms Hanna will watch closely for a number of appointments Mr Golding has to make or facilitate in the short term.

For example, there is a Senate seat to be filled for the one that was not occupied by Norman Horne after his appointment by Dr Phillips in the aftermath of the general election. Additionally, the party’s current general secretary, Julian Robinson, and its chairman, Fitz Jackson, both perceived to be supporters of Dr Phillips, who Mr Golding opposed during Mr Bunting’s challenge, are on their way out. Party insiders are watching closely for whom Mr Golding proposes as their successors.

On the national level, Mr Golding will have to make a compelling case, other than personality and inconsequential differences on the margins, why Jamaicans should vote for his party, rather than for Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ JLP. In other words, he has to articulate a big, and hopefully, transformative vision of the PNP.

The PNP used to describe itself, as declared in its constitution, a democratic socialist party, not dissimilar to the social democratic ones of western Europe. But over the past quarter of a century or so, as the global environment has changed, the PNP has struggled – despite a long stretch in office during the 1990s until the midway into the first decade of the 2000s – to find a clear philosophical or ideological anchor. Having lurched to the right, there is little that differentiates it from the JLP.

Maybe this is the ideological spectrum in which the internal vision demands that the PNP settle. If that is the case, Mr Golding now has to translate that into an argument as to how his version is better than the JLP’s.