The opposition parties have been quick to hail the results of the village council elections as a victory for them and a defeat for the MSM and the government. In this, the opposition seems to be overestimating just how accurate a political barometer village council elections really are. Unlike general elections, village council polls are not carried out on political party lines; the elections are soon followed by a lot of horse-trading and candidates crossing over from one side to another to determine the dominance of one party or another on district councils.  

Another reason for a little sobriety is that it’s just too soon to extrapolate anything about general elections from this. The real contest is yet four years away and a lot can happen in the meantime. Such hubris has cost the opposition parties dearly in the recent past. Remember the December 2017 by-election in Quatre Bornes? Labour Party’s Arvin Boolell won by a large margin. The assumption then was that, since Quatre-Bornes had returned winning coalitions in past elections, Labour Party interpreted it as a sign of its political revival after the 2014 debacle; and all opposition parties calibrating their political calculations based on that.

Labour roped in the PMSD confident of victory, so much so that they did not bother coming up with much of a manifesto and the MMM going it alone assuming that the Labour Party was strong enough to split the rural vote with the MSM, leaving the MMM as the king-maker, who would then drive a hard bargain. And that was two years, not four years, before an election. And that was a by-election for the national assembly overtly fought by political parties, not shadowboxing by localized proxies in colourful groupings.

Reducing village council elections to just another muscle-flexing contest by political parties is a pity, given that there is a real issue facing this rural democracy. The biggest is that these polls, unlike other polls, have no real constitutional status. A general election being delayed from 1972 to 1976 was considered so offensive to democratic sensibilities that, in 1982, the constitution was amended to automatically dissolve parliament every five years to ensure it never happened again.

And yet village council elections, since they don’t figure in the constitution but just in the Local Government Act, have been delayed time and again, based exclusively on political convenience. The polls that just took place were supposed to have been held in 2018. Nor does it make sense why village council elections are treated with such political contempt: another local government body, the Rodrigues Regional Assembly, is included in the constitution and, if local government in Rodrigues concerns voters there, local government elections concern many more voters in Mauritius. If village councils are dismissed as being too dependent on government funds to take seriously enough to protect in the constitution, the same is equally true of Rodrigues. So why is one form of local government constitutionally privileged over another?

These are the types of questions that are pushed aside when political parties insist on looking at everything through the prism of elections four years away and risk repeating the same mistakes of the past.