Through a glass darkly

Austin Fido

I SPEND a lot of time watching people be Angry Online about politics. Very often, I watch people be Angry Online about TT politics. Not too long ago, I watched a master of this particular genre rile himself about Stuart Young’s elevation to prime-minister-in-waiting. Young cannot be made PM just so, argued Angry Online, because the TT Constitution does not allow it.

Personally, I think Angry Online is wrong. More importantly, I think people actually qualified to adjudicate what the TT Constitution does or doesn’t allow would also conclude he is wrong, should such a contention ever need formal evaluation. But I do think Angry Online was tapping into a widely held point of view regarding the imminent appointment of a new TT PM: the vibe is off.

I’ve seen many arguments against the manner of Young’s elevation to PM: it’s not allowed because of the TT Constitution, the PNM constitution, the imperatives of natural justice, the law of gravity, the offside rule, no returns without a valid receipt, or whatever higher authority one prefers. All arguments made to scratch a persistent itch, because it just doesn’t feel right for a bunch of MPs to go picnicking in Tobago and come back with a new prime minister.

Why doesn’t it feel right? I think it’s because Young is not the prime minister people voted for at the last election. Votes cast in support of the PNM in 2020 were votes cast in expectation that Keith Rowley would be PM. If Rowley doesn’t want the job, there is a sense this should bring the question of who leads TT back to the people.

Cue a lot of casting around for a solid legal reason to dissolve Parliament and have a new election. But there isn’t one, because the principle governing the appointment of a PM in TT and almost any parliamentary system in the world is simply that the leader of the government is whichever MP is backed for that job by a majority in Parliament.

At an election, you vote for an MP, not a PM. You might vote for an MP because of who you want to be PM, but technically, that appointment comes from support expressed by MPs in Parliament, not votes cast at the election that puts those MPs in Parliament. The only people who voted for Rowley at the last election were constituents in Diego Martin West.

Yet for many people, that is a mere technicality of government. Parliamentary elections have long been presidential events, focused on individual leaders more than parties. Hence for the last couple of rounds of democratic jousting in TT, we’ve been sold Keith vs Kamla, not Most-Popular-Guy-At-The-Picnic vs Kamla. And that is how you can end up shouting at the internet about the wording of the TT Constitution when Rowley says he’s quitting the field.

I would suggest, however, that the villain here is not Keith, Stuart, the PNM, or whoever is writing UNC press releases in such a rage they forget headlines are supposed to be short. The real villain is the Americanisation of a political process that is not American.

“Presidential-style elections” have morphed into elections in which people think they are electing a president. The PM in our system is entirely analogous to the President in the US system: similar authority, powers, status – it’s easy to see the source of the confusion.

But the two leaders differ on an important and fundamental point: their democratic mandate. The US President derives legitimacy from votes cast in a nationwide presidential election. The TT PM derives legitimacy from being elected to Parliament by votes cast for them as a constituency MP in a general election, and they become PM because they have the demonstrated ability to command the support of a majority of their fellow MPs in Parliament.

Is political chicanery detectable in the appointment of Stuart Young to the office of PM? Sure. Is it unconstitutional? No. But if you think Keith Rowley is an elected president who has just stepped aside mid-term in favour of a guy who won a raffle at a picnic, I absolutely get why you might be Angry Online.

This and other constitutional debates like term limits for prime ministers (Why? So someone else can have a turn? Is this beach cricket?) are symptoms of the increasing misconception that the TT system of government is somehow a vision of the American system seen through a glass darkly. It is not. Not yet, at least.