The PMSD leader Xavier Luc Duval is playing with fire. This is in sharp contrast to how he has worked until recently to distance himself from the communal rabble-rousing legacy of his father, Gaetan Duval, and transform the PMSD into a mild, non-controversial right-of-centre party. To understand this evolution of the PMSD, a little background is in order. 

In 2015, everything seemed to be going Duval’s way. He was a popular minister and his main rival, the MMM, seemed to be imploding after a disastrous alliance with the Labour Party. Overestimating his own strength, Duval decided to strike out on his own, using the prosecution commission bill to part ways with the MSM. The PMSD and its supporters now saw Duval as a prime minister waiting for his turn. After all, out of the ‘big four’, the PMSD is the only party that has not got the prime ministership (even Bérenger got a brief two-year stab at the job). And so Duval edged out Bérenger as leader of the opposition. It seemed that the PMSD’s time had come. 

The dream was shattered by the 2017 by-election in Quatre-Bornes, Duval’s own constituency. The PMSD candidate trailed in fifth place, behind even Jack Bizlall (who got the government votes that had nowhere else to go). Duval and the PMSD were brought back to earth. Quatre-Bornes showed that the PMSD would need an alliance after all, as Duval himself admitted after analysing the result. The trouble is that no one is in a hurry to contract an alliance as long as the legal troubles of the leaders of the Labour Party and the MSM are not sorted out. The ‘Zoli Mamzel’ may be willing, but has to make do without a consort for now. 

So what does Duval do? If reaching out to others has not succeeded, he will try to consolidate what he has and try to poach some voters from the hemorrhaging MMM. The mamzel must be fattened up for the big day when a suitor comes calling. And so Duval has embarked on two prongs to achieve this: call for an ethnic census by taking advantage of an ultimatum presented by the UN (inadvertently served up by the ReA, just as Bizlall’s ‘Second Republic mutated into a Labour-MMM alliance) and in the second place call for changing constituency boundaries to make them more ‘fair’. Now of course, Duval – and some others as well – who call for ‘fair and equal’ constituencies are not quite telling the whole truth of the matter. If we have ‘unfair’ constituencies, it’s because some – particularly in Port Louis – were gerrymandered to boost minority representation in Parliament while others were deflated to prevent overrepresentation of other communities. This was an agreement quite consciously drawn up in the 1960s by the Labour Party in exchange for getting other parties to agree to its insistence to stick to the first-past-the-post and reject Gaetan Duval’s demand for an electoral system based entirely on proportional representation. It was based on a far-sighted understandings like these that the Labour Party was able to stick together a multi-religious coalition to fight for independence. ‘Fairness’ had nothing to do with it. If it’s unequal or ‘unfair’, that’s by design and not by omission, as Rama Sithanen has rightly pointed out. 

But it’s not only the lack of realism and historical context being peddled by Duval in wanting to change constituency boundaries that’s disturbing, so too is his attempt to force such changes through by directly attacking the Electoral Boundaries Commission. He calls its members ‘fatras’ and calls for the dissolution of the commission. And here he is being indirectly helped by the prime minister, Pravind Jugnauth (another bull in a china shop) who is undermining the prestige of the commission by looking to pack it with his own creatures, in a bid to make up for his declining popularity by attempting to control every lever of state power he can. 

Both of them hope to eventually displace Labour and the MMM and claim to speak for the future. What is remarkable for gentlemen with such lofty ambitions is that both are galloping ahead with no sense of danger. 

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