Latest update November 26th, 2024 1:00 AM
Dec 04, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Guyana has its Macron. He is Moses Nagamootoo. President Macron of France probably doesn’t know about Nagamootoo in Guyana. If he did, one doesn’t know if Macron would have walked a different pathway.
Nagamootoo proclaimed that he was a thoroughbred and he wrote that he always remembers his father’s advice that thoroughbreds don’t back down; they always run and he is running in Whim as a thoroughbred in the 2018 LGE.
The thoroughbred did run but he came in last. Nagamootoo and his relatives were badly beaten in Whim. So bad were the licks that even the persons who prepared the thoroughbred and dressed them up for the race didn’t vote for them. Nagamootoo’s race collapsed before the bell rang. And the lessons are easy to learn.
In politics, you will lose if you look like the people you ousted to enter office. People will vent their anger even more on you than the government you defeated because they trusted you and you now appear deceitful to them.
Macron created history in the world. A man who was never involved in any kind of politics, he was handpicked as economy minister in the previous government of President Hollande. Sensing that like so many other countries, particularly the US and Greece that people were fed up with the failures of the strong, dominant, traditional parties, he decided to run for president.
He won becoming the youngest president of France. He formed his own party that secured a parliamentary majority. Macron had it made. He didn’t need to be burdened with a truculent opposition in parliament.
Macron came from a strong upper class existence. But that didn’t affect him simply because as in the US, people wanted a new face even if he were a billionaire. They were simply implacable when it came to denouncing the parties that were in power for so long and impoverished them.
As he settled into power, Macron became the Alexis Tsipras of Greece. Unlike Tsipras, Macron is facing violent revolts, that at the time of writing, no one knows if his presidency will survive.
After Greece found the austerity measures by the European Central Bank (ECB) and the IMF too horrible to bear, any party that offered an alternative to the supine government of the day, they would welcome. They embraced Tsipras. He became Greece’s youngest Prime Minister.
Then Greece under their new radical Prime Minister, looked the identical country during the austerity pressures of the previous government.
Tsipras began to accept the same harsh recipes from the IMF and the ECB that he denounced as an opposition parliamentarian that his left-wing Finance Minister resigned and a number of his party’s MPs rebelled. A painful irony descended on Greece.
Tsipras’s own parliamentarians didn’t agree to pass his austerity package and he had to rely on the votes of the traditional parties who he denounced for that very same package when they ruled the country.
What Tsipras did is what Trump did also. They saw a chance to become the leader of their country. That was all. They had no intention of changing anything. In Guyana we have our Tsipras- Moses Nagamootoo. He saw a chance of toppling the PPP. He did just that and now he does nothing else with his time. Of course he ran in his hometown as a thoroughbred.
Macron betrayed the people who voted for him eighteen months ago and now Paris is burning. Scenes of the violence make you feel that if Macron doesn’t fall, his presidency will never recover. One thing is sure – his image and credibility will never recover. Scene of the rebellion on the streets of not only Paris but other parts of France take you back to 1968 when the world looked like it would have another French Revolution.
Tsipras and Trump will lose future elections in their respective countries. The writing is on the wall for Trump. He barely increase the number of Republican senators in the midterm elections recently half and he lost the House of Representatives. In some very strong Trumpian parts of the US where Trump was seen as a virtual saviour, his Republican colleague just barely won. That is a harbinger for the future
Guyana has its versions of Trump, Tsipras and Macron. There was anger at the results of the 2018 LGE but that anger has a hypocritical derivative. If you remove a group of leaders that behaved terrible when in office, you cannot repeat the same deportment.
I went up to a female ANPU+AFC minister and told her it doesn’t look good to have the driver open the car door for you to come out and for you to enter. No female PPP minister did that.
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