Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley said yesterday that while the Express-commissioned poll showed a close race between the People’s Partnership and the People’s National Movement (PNM) if general elections were called now, polls conducted by the party point to a PNM victory.
“We, too, have been doing our polls and while the pollster is of the view of ‘probably’, we are confident on the basis of the work we have done and the polls indicate that we will win the election so we feel very confident about that and the population can differentiate between being force-fed propaganda and reality,” said Rowley. He said Government also had information about the numbers and this was the reason the run-off provision in the Constitution Amendment Bill came into being.
“All those who had difficulty in understanding what the Government was doing on the Constitution Bill and who couldn’t understand the Government’s behaviour, they now can see. The Government saw that a run-off poll could work for them and this was the genesis of it being placed in the legislation,” said Rowley.
“So no matter how they coat it about the strengthening of democracy, it was a response to the Government seeing these numbers in the poll and hoping they can use that to change the outcome of the elections,” he said.
Rowley said the PNM was certain that the people will vote out the People’s Partnership Government.
“We have confidence in the population that they will intervene to put an end to the current poor governance, the corruption, the incompetence and all this Government has given to the people of Trinidad and Tobago,” he said.
“The population recognises the PNM as the country’s premier political institution and if they are unhappy at any point in time with what the PNM is doing they express themselves, it happened in ‘86, it happened in ‘95, it happened in 2010 but the population recognises that there will be an organisation that will be responsible for the country’s affairs,” he added.
He said the PNM will not shove down the country’s throat anything which they don’t want.
“It’s a question of what are you representing in the current environment. We are confident that we are representing the best that’s available to the people of Trinidad and Tobago,” he said.
Questioned on whether he felt the PNM has corrected its past errors and if the population has renewed faith in the party, Rowley said, “While we acknowledge that there were some things that didn’t go well in 2010, on the other hand there was a lot that the PNM did that was good or not fully understood which the population can now view differently.
“We will rectify whatever shortcomings we had in 2010 and we will be much better able to convince the population whenever the elections are called that the PNM is best for the nation.”
He said over the next few months the PNM will intensify its election campaign.
“It will be a continuation of what we have been doing in the last four years, we didn’t just sit down, we have been reviewing our policies and programmes, we’ve made changes where we had to, we stood firm on issues where we believed we should stand firm on,” he said
“We have changed personnel, we’ve ‘effected’ our party’s Constitution, we have had elections, we are recruiting new people… When you put all that together the PNM represents the best option for the country,” Rowley added.