Editorial | The PNP’s task

Going by Don Anderson’s recent opinion poll – which this newspaper has no reason to question – as well as the results of last February’s municipal vote – the People’s National Party (PNP) has a decent shot at winning the general election that’s due by September, 2025.

According to the survey, conducted for the opposition party last month, the PNP enjoyed a 36.8 per cent support among adult Jamaicans, or a 7.8 percentage points more than the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). Fifteen per cent of the electorate said they won’t vote and 19.1 per cent were undecided if they will, and for whom if they do.

It is the first time in several years that the PNP, which was wracked by in-fighting after losing the government in 2016, has been ahead of the JLP in an opinion survey by more than a smidgen over the poll’s margin or error. Last September, when it first moved past the JLP, its 29.5 per cent support was less than half of a percentage point above the three per cent error margin of Mr Anderson’s poll.

On the latest numbers, barring a shift in fortunes for the JLP, the PNP would comfortably win an election if it were called now.

Some critics, of course, will question the credibility of the data because the survey was paid for by the PNP. The Gleaner does not.

Mr Anderson and his Market Research Services Limited (MRSL), whose polling services are widely used across the Caribbean – including by this newspaper and, in the past, the JLP – have developed an enviable reputation for accuracy. It is unfathomable that they would risk their professionalism and integrity for short-term commercial or political interests.

However, it would be wrong for anyone, and particularly the PNP, to assume that the election is foregone. To paraphrase Harold Wilson, the former British, Labour prime minister, a week is a long time in politics – much more 16 months. The JLP, especially with its leverage of government, has time to recover.

WRONG MESSAGE

Further, we hope that the PNP and its leader, Mark Golding, don’t take the wrong message from these findings, concluding that the party’s best strategy for protecting its lead is not to take risks and hope that voter dissatisfaction and/or an implosion of the administration will take them to victory.

Jamaica’s voters deserve more. They must have the opportunity to assess not only broad outlines, but in specific detail, the programmes and policies on offer by the alternative party. And not, as is usually the case, in manifestos released at the eleventh hour to an election.

To be fair to the PNP, after a long stretch of mostly small-bore sniping against the Holness administration, it has recently attempted to position itself as a party with clear ideas and solutions, distinct from the JLP’s, to Jamaica’s problems.

Notably, too, its leader, Mr Golding, a white Jamaican who is well rooted in the country and its culture, appears to have grown more comfortable in his job and in his own skin. He seems less inclined to strive for a contrived authenticity and connectedness that often made him appear inauthentic. His intellect and grasp of policy are now more apparent.

But Mr Golding and his party still have much work to do.

Over the past dozen years, Jamaica, across administrations, has retreated from a fiscal precipice to achieve macroeconomic stability. By running one of the world’s highest primary surpluses (starting at 7.5 per cent of GDP in the initial years of an agreement with the IMF) it has reduced its public debt from nearly 150 per cent of GDP in 2013, to just over 70 per cent at present. It has also balanced its fiscal accounts and achieved surpluses. Unemployment has fallen from double digits to four per cent.

POSTER CHILD

Indeed, the island has been a global poster child for fiscal rectitude.

Despite these gains, growth (2.6 per cent in 2023) robust economic growth remains elusive, and income and wealth distribution continue to be highly skewed.

In the budget debate in March, Mr Golding argued that it was the PNP’s 2012-2016 administration that did the heavy lifting towards fiscal stability and that the party wouldn’t undermine those gains.

“But we also recognise that 2024 is not 2012 and the challenges and priorities are now different,” he said. “Economic stability is not sufficient to meet the expectation of the Jamaican people.”

The aim of a PNP administration, he said, would be to transition Jamaica from “a low wage, low tech, low productivity, low growth economy to one which delivers high value-added goods and services to domestic and export markets”.

He promised a raft of initiatives to underpin this project while at the same time providing safety nets for the country’s most vulnerable and spending on social services and infrastructure.

The question is not whether Mr Golding’s broad sentiments are right, or the specific initiatives he has proposed. Indeed, there is consensus on Jamaica’s need to extricate itself from the low productivity and low-growth trap in which it has existed for more than four decades.

What the PNP must do, though, is move beyond broad ideas to the nitty gritty of policy and their implementation. And critically, in the context of the fiscal environment, how his initiatives will be funded.

Given the possibilities raised by the polls, the PNP must show itself to be a credible alternative government.