My Year in Politics Awards

Austin Fido

AS YEAR-END approaches, it is time for taking stock. In that spirit, here is a look at some highlights and lowlights of the political scene from around the world: this column’s entirely unofficial Year in Politics Awards (2024 global edition).

1. The Don’t-Try-This-At-Home Award: Javier Milei

Javier Milei has spent much of December doing a victory lap of global media. With good reason: he has spectacularly turned around Argentina’s economic fortunes. Runaway inflation is curbed, the budget is in surplus and the economy is in growth: all within a year of Milei taking office.

We are heading into an election year in TT, why not seek to emulate the standout political success story of 2024?

Well, rising unemployment and a national poverty rate of 53 per cent – the most obvious costs of Milei’s policies – might be reasons at least to pause before seeking to import the Argentine anarcho-capitalist agenda.

His campaign did not sugarcoat the fact Milei’s policies – mostly about radically reducing the size the public sector – would make some things worse before they got better. That is what his supporters voted for – but is that a price TT is willing to pay for economic growth?

Milei has confounded a great many critics this year and is suddenly getting a closer look from many who previously dismissed him as a wild-eyed ideologue.

But to anyone thinking the lesson emerging from Buenos Aires is that it is time for TT to hop aboard the Libertarianism Express: consider that Argentina is still a country with several problems to resolve, and some of those problems are now worse than they were before.

2. The Show Me Your Worst Unparliamentary Behaviour Award

Current Philippines VP Sara Duterte has been telling anyone who will listen about what she’d like to do to her erstwhile running mate, Philippines president Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos. The list includes: exhume Bongbong’s father’s remains so she can throw them into the sea; decapitate Bongbong; and have a hitman execute Bongbong, his wife and his cousin, in the event Duterte should come to any harm. And she’s only a runner-up for this award. This is a tough category.

Duterte’s brutal imaginings are mostly in the service of self-advancement. To be truly award-worthy political misbehaviour needs to stand for something bigger than the individual misbehaving.

For that, we look to New Zealand, where Te Pati Maori MPs staged a haka – a genre of ceremonial dance traditional to the Maori people – in Parliament.

The occasion was the reading of a bill that essentially proposed revisiting the constitutional principles that underscore the Maori people’s position in the New Zealand body politic. Protesting a threat to Maori rights with a demonstration of Maori rites: genius. If there was a more popular moment of parliamentary disorder on YouTube this year, I’d love to see it.

Next time the opposition in the Red House wants to walk out of a debate, maybe consider the example set by Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke and her colleagues: rip up that order paper and dance.

3. The Grace is Still a Virtue Award

There was a moment during Ghana’s recent presidential election when it seemed things might go bad. A couple of people were murdered on election day; an Electoral Commission office was wrecked after the polls closed. Beleaguered election officials pleaded to be allowed to do their work unimpeded.

Then Mahamudu Bawumia, sitting VP and the ruling party’s presidential candidate, declared himself the loser.

This was not an official announcement, but he had seen enough of his party’s internal data to know the race was lost. His having the grace to accept the loss spared his country a potentially messy period of partisan clashes while the Electoral Commission finished the count.

Guyana’s 2020 presidential election was the subject of an unusually bold effort to subvert democratic processes: officials simply announced results that couldn’t be verified. It took a surprisingly long time for that brazen act of malfeasance to be resolved.

In 2025, Guyana will go to the polls again. As will Jamaica, Suriname, Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos, Belize, Curacao, St Vincent and TT.

For democracy to flourish, electoral processes must be regarded as more important than outcomes. Investigate any evidence of actual electoral crimes, for sure.

But, absent such evidence, accept that every election must have losers, follow the example set by Mahamudu Bawumia and let your country move forward.

Austin Fido is a writer and researcher. He has never cheated at an election, danced in Parliament, or been to Argentina