In the face of a weekend announcement that general election will be called shortly in Grenada, the interim Political Leader of the Grenada United Labour Party (GULP), Geoffrey Preudhomme has disclosed that the party will contest all fifteen constituencies but will concentrate on eleven of the fifteen seats at stake.
In an exclusive interview with THE NEW TODAY on Monday, the USA-based Preudhomme said the party has ruled out the possibility of winning four seats from the ruling New National Party (NNP) at this stage – The Town of St George (Peter David), St. George North-west (Prime Minister Dr. Keith Mitchell), Carriacou & Petite Martinique (Kindra Maturine-Stewart) and St. George South-east (Gregory Bowen).
“There are four seats that right now look impossible, so based on the analysis that we have done and we had,” he said.
“We think we can make some inroads in St Mark’s but they (NNP) are very much embedded there,” he added.
NNP has never lost St Mark since Grenada returned to democratic rule of law in 1984 after four-and-a-half years of Marxist rule by the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) which took office when the New Jewel Movement (NJM) of Maurice Bishop deposed the labour party in a coup d’etat on March 13, 1979.
According to Preudhomme, with the limited resources at the disposal of GULP, the party has to concentrate and place them “on where the possibilities exist.”
He said it is well known historically that GULP has never been strong in the Town of St George constituency and the sister isle of Carriacou and Petite Martinique and will be engaged in only token representation in these two seats whenever PM Mitchell calls the election.
GULP has never won Carriacou and Petite Martinique and only managed to win the city seat once in the 1972 general election through a former headmaster from Barbados, John Morris who defeated late attorney-of-law, Hudson Scipio of the Grenada National Party (GNP).
There are reports that the party founder, Sir Eric Gairy boosted the GULP support in the town of St George through the construction of a major housing scheme for persons from the rural areas who landed jobs like policemen and nurses.
Preudhomme will be contesting the rural St. John seat held by Alvin Da Breo, the current Minister with responsibility for Forestry and Fisheries within the Ministry of Climate Resilience and The Environment.
The seat was once considered a stronghold of GULP for several years under Preudhomme’s father, the late Herbert Preudhomme who served as Deputy Prime Minister in the labour party government until it was ousted from power in 1979.
According to Preudhomme, the party is fully aware of the seats that will be very difficult to win from the NNP as it lacks the necessary financial resources to put in a serious challenge at the moment.
He said the GULP will have “somebody” in the four difficult seats working for the party but “we know it is challenging – it will take millions of dollars to reverse it.”
He said the party will put “a greater effort” in the other eleven constituencies to try and win seats to enter into Parliament.
“You have to have a strategy – you have to know what is doable, almost impossible,” he remarked.
Pruedhomme dismissed suggestions that GULP is politically dead in Grenada, saying the party is very much alive and its plans and programmes can be seen by all and sundry on its website at GULPGRENADA.COM.
“Everything we sent out over the last two years was connected to our website,” he said.
The new GULP boss acknowledged that the party was very much dormant for the past 20 years and that the rebuilding process now underway has to be done “in a non-traditional way.”
“That is what we have been trying to do,” he said.
Preudhomme did not express surprise when told that no one is hearing anything about GULP but more so the two leading parties on the island – the ruling New National Party and the main opposition National Democratic Congress.
He said the island’s oldest political party which last tasted power in the 1976-79 period has been deliberate in its approach and concentrating more on being “in the field.”
“It’s sort of deliberate because that’s how we have been working, behind the scenes – we are in the field.
We can do a better job but based on how we are proceeding, we are more strategic in how we are running in trying to rebuild the party. It is quite challenging, it is quite difficult but it is doable.
We are in for the long haul. This is just the first round in rebuilding the party and rebuilding the infrastructure and the machinery because none of those things existed.
We had no physical structures, we had no archives that we could directly go to. Everything that we had done we have built from scratch and that is what we have been doing.
We have created a logo, we created a portfolio of products, we created our pre-manifesto, we have 12, 000 copies on the ground.
We have identified and we are building around community leaders who are in their community.
We have St John, St Mark, St Patrick, most of St Andrew’s and we are working on St George’s as a parish on the whole.”