What ever happened to the run-off? When the St Lucia Labour Party announced that Dr Desmond Long would be their candidate for the Anse la Raye/Canaries seat in the next election, it seemed to fit. Long, better known as the Mighty Pep, one of the most winning calypsonians in St Lucian history, is just the kind of candidate that Labour has always wanted. He’s university educated, well known and very well respected.

However, beneath the surface of Labour’s perfect fit, trouble may be brewing.

“We’re not saying he cannot be the candidate,” said one hardcore Labourite, who did not want to be named, for fear of attracting the ire of her party’s leadership. “We’re just saying that he should face a run-off so that the party can know what the people want.”

What do the people want? It depends on who you ask.

In Anse la Raye and Canaries, there are several people who are interested in challenging the ruling party incumbent Dr Keith Mondesir. In the early stages of the game, one of the leading contenders was former senior police officer and the man who was once the next Commissioner of Police, Hermangild Francis, brother to talk show host and former SLP second deputy chair, Claudius Francis. Also named as a possible contender was Jude Regis, a senior public service engineer.

At the SLP’s annual convention at the end of January, Anse la Raye-Canaries was heavily represented as several of the potential candidates hired buses to transport their supporters to the convention venue in Vieux Fort, ostensibly to make their point to party leadership. While the supporters of three new candidates from other seats celebrated their confirmations, the potential candidates from Anse La Rae-Canaries politely jostled for the attention of the party’s leadership, hoping to win the tacit support of the party hierarchy.

Each potential candidate hoped that winning the favour of the party leadership could help them win a run-off and tip them over to a confirmation. What none of them expected was that the party leadership was not interested in a run-off at all. In Anse la Raye-Canaries, it seems, the run-off is an impediment to the goals of the party.

What a difference a decade makes.

It was 1996/7 when the St Lucia Labour Party introduced a revolution in democracy to party politics. Instead of picking candidates from the top, Labour decided it was in their best interest and the best interest of the country to allow delegates from the constituencies to have a choice between different candidates and to let the pieces fall where they may. All the political leader and the party executive still had the power to review and reject those chosen by this process, there was a feeling that more power had been given to the rank and file of the party to determine who would represent them in parliament. It smelt like true democracy.

Unfortunately, by 2006, the run-off was giving the SLP leadership outcomes that it didn’t want. Where in Babonneau, the run-off had allowed the party to replace a sitting incumbent like Michael Gaspard with the more educated, more Kenny-friendly Felix Finisterre, in Anse la Raye-Canaries, it was a different story. In 2006, the party wanted to replace the somewhat embarrassing incumbent Cyprian Lansiquot with the more respected agricultural administrator and trade union president David Demacque. Although Lansiquot was a lawyer by then, Demacque was seen as the kind of candidate that Labour wanted in its parliament and perhaps more importantly, its Cabinet.

But the people of Anse La Raye-Canaries were not buying it. In the run-off that decided who ran for SLP in 2006, Lansiquot squashed Demacque’s attempt to abort his incumbency. Tensions flared between the candidate and the leadership of his party but there was nothing anyone could do about it. The people had spoken.

The final outcome of that story was that Keith Mondesir, formerly the only candidate of George Odlum’s last political adventure, the National Alliance, to not lose his deposit, won the seat for the United Workers Party, sending a message that it didn’t matter whether Labour sent Demacque, Lansiquot or even Kenny Anthony himself.

Now, Mondesir is well entrenched in the seat bolstered by Taiwanese project funds, a divided base of Labour supporters and a consolidation of Flambeau supporters and old Odlumites that will make it difficult for any Labour candidate to beat him.

But Mondesir’s worsening national profile, helped by a series of scandals, most of them of his own making, made a number of contenders imagine that they could be the man to take him down and free up the seat for Labour. It looked like Labour was on the right track to giving the people what they want.

The only problem with that was, well, the same problem that Labour has with just about everything—recent history. Recent history indicated that Anse La Raye-Canaries people did not like master’s degree and PhD holders as much as Labour’s leadership did. Recent history implied that the people might actually be bent on giving Kenny Anthony exactly the result he didn’t want. It seemed that to some extent, Anse La Raye-Canaries people were actually punishing the Labour party for its high and mighty academic and intellectual biases by pushing forward candidates who were more like the regular people who infest the double district constituency.

The solution for it seemed simple. Get rid of the academic-intellectual bias and give the people what they want.

But in the upper echelons of the Labour party, getting the candidate with the right profile seems more important than getting a candidate who can beat Mondesir. And so, two weeks ago, the word came down from the top. The leadership had used its power not just to trump the result of any run-off, but to cancel the run-off completely. If Labour was going to lose the election, like they did in 2006, at least the leadership was going to be satisfied that it fielded the candidate it wanted.

Can Desmond ‘Pep’ Long beat one of Flambeau’s strongest incumbents?

SLP public relations officer Eugene Long says, “The short man is well-loved in the constituency.” But Julian Hunte is well-loved in Gros Islet and Lenard ‘Spider’ Montoute still gave him a thrashing he never expected in the 2006 elections.

If Pep expects to win, he has to bring the broken pieces of Labour’s divided base in Anse La Raye, Canaries and Millet back together again. It’s not an easy job. Labour’s base in the seat has been fragmented for several years now. If all Kenny’s horses and all the Kenny’s men could not put that Humpty together again, what makes Pep think that seven calypso crowns, a medical degree and the love of his community will do it? Like the boss says, film at eleven!