The MMM leader, Paul Bérenger, came up with a curious offer at his party’s end-of-year celebrations: he and Navin Ramgoolam could agree not to run for prime minister in the next election in a future alliance between the MMM and the Labour Party to dislodge the MSM.

At face-value, the idea seems an unworkable one: if neither Bérenger nor Ramgoolam would present themselves as prime ministerial candidates, who would such an arrangement present?  Neither party has a rich slew of potential prime ministers and this is a problem of their own making. In both parties, the second-tier leadership has been engineered over decades to be made up almost exclusively of figures appealing to this or that constituency or this or that community.  Except for the party leader, none have nationwide appeal key to taking on the Jugnauth electoral machine. But supposing both could magically find and then agree on such a prime ministerial candidate, he would inevitably be a puppet with Bérenger and Ramgoolam really pulling the strings. The MMM should know by bitter experience how that idea ends up. In 1982, the party installed Anerood Jugnauth as prime minister while Bérenger controlled the party machine. In just nine months, Jugnauth shrugged off the MMM, split the party down communal lines and created the MSM. And what is worse than being at the beck and call of one party leader? Trying to march to the tune of two. Nor is this idea likely to be taken seriously by the Labour party. Ramgoolam has spent the last five years trying to transform Mauritian politics into a personal competition between himself and Pravind Jugnauth and he is not about to risk setting up a potential rival dynasty if he does not have to.

But this proposal is not meant to be taken at face value. Nor is the Labour Party its intended audience, really. By indicating that he is willing to forgo becoming prime minister again, Bérenger is in effect looking for a 1993 redux. The MMM when it has been in opposition with the Labour Party, has always preferred to push Ramgoolam in front. Even when it has been the stronger party. In 1993, for example, after the MMM broke with the MSM government and went into the opposition, even though it controlled way more seats than the Labour Party, it agreed to keep Ramgoolam as the opposition leader and a prime ministerial candidate in the 1995 election. The real message that Bérenger is sending out is that he is prepared to not be the prime minister again in an alliance with Labour, as he did in the 1995 election. And it’s being said in front of an MMM audience that just so recently was expecting to see a Bérenger prime ministership. In effect, humbled in the recent election and shorn of its bluster, the MMM is now signalling that it’s willing to enter into another 1995-like agreement with Labour. This is a significant concession on the part of Bérenger and the real kernel within the outlandish husk. 

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