This week marked the National elections for Trinidad&Tobago. The last few weeks leading up to the election were rather "interesting." The campaigning process here is quite different than in the USA. It consists largely of cars driving around with huge speaker/megaphones strapped to the hoods shouting slogans and playing calypso-style music with lyrics for their candidates. Sometimes they get sound systems loaded into the back of flat-bed trucks and people ride around playing the music and shouting into the speakers for their candidates.
Basically, it is very loud and annoying. They crank up the volume so you can hear them from miles away. You can hear the constant beat and shouting of competing candidates. There are up until this year there have been two political parties, the People's National Movement (PNM, and the current party in power) and the United National Congress (UNC). However, this year, a third party threw its hat into the ring, the Congress of the People (COP) who have been disenchanted with both parties.
Last weekend was the big final push before the elections on Monday. Each political party sponsors a huge rally/festival to garner votes. I guess the idea is that who ever can throw the biggest, best party wins! The UNC had their rally in the savanna next to my apartment complex (you can see a picture of the savanna in one of my first posts). The estimate over 75,000 people attended the rally here. It was a mess. The roads were gridlocked in all directions all day. I was pretty much stuck in the apartment complex. I walked out and took a few pictures of the rally, but they are early in the day before all of the bands and entertainment when it got too dark to really take good pictures and too crowded to move around. People were dancing and drinking in the streets for blocks around because it was too crowded to get into the rally. It was unbelievable the amount of alcohol consumed at the rally. In the picture you can see that everyone is dressed in orange. It's the official color of the UNC party.
The elections were on Monday, and the incumbent party, PNM won convincingly. Which was fortunate for me because they are the party sponsoring the police transformation project I am working on, and if one of the other parties had one, we were told it was likely that our contracts would be canceled. It's interesting, whichever party wins the election takes over the next day. There is no transition period like there is in the USA. The Prime Minister and his cabinet would have to move out of their homes and offices the day after the elections. It's quite a bureaucratic mess when political power changes (even more so than exists day to day here, which is saying a lot).
Polls close at 6pm and ballots are counted so that the winners are known by that night. This develops into another rally where the winning political party celebrates. However, this party is not for just the principle party supporters, it is for everyone. My neighbor, who is a good friend and police officer came knocking at my door to wake me up about 11:00pm. He said, "You can't be sleepin' my brudda, we winnin', we need to go to da party!" So I got dressed and went with him and his family to the PNM headquarters in downtown Port of Spain for the big celebratory rally.
Here is a picture of Ransome and his family just before we left. He got his kids out of bed as well. Notice the red index fingers on Ransome and his wife. These are ink markings that they voted. It's one of the controls used to ensure that people on vote once. They are all dressed in red because that is the party color for PNM.
I was amazed at the number of people that came out to celebrate the election's outcome. There were a lot of kids there, but again there was a lot of alcohol being sold by street vendors. There was a lot of food being sold as well. We stayed until about 2am. When we left there were still huge groups of people arriving. It must have gone all night...
