The MMM has re-floated the idea of lowering the minimum voting age to 16, after first coining the idea back in 2021, and pledging to include it in their next election manifesto. In addition, its leader, Paul Bérenger, has called for intergenerational solidarity. Does Mauritian politics have a generational problem?

1) Lowering the voting age

Last week, the opposition party Mouvement militant mauricien (MMM) once again re-floated the idea of lowering the minimum voting age from 18 to 16 years. The last time the idea was touched upon was in 2021 when L’Espoir bloc proposed it and pledged to include it in its manifesto for the next general elections. “I suppose that this is part of a historical trend of the general widening of the franchise in Mauritius,” Lindsay Collen of Lalit tells l’express. In 1885, extremely limited voting rights were allowed in colonial Mauritius, restricted to a tiny propertyowned elite (1.5 per cent of the population at the time). Then, in 1947, the vote was extended from property owners to those above 21 years old who could pass a literacy test before being extended to anyone above 18 years of age as from December 1975. 

One argument that the MMM has raised is that a number of other states allow 16-year-olds to vote; these include a diverse array of states, such as Brazil, Ecuador, Austria, Cuba, Malta, Nicaragua, Argentina and territories such as Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Scotland. “This is an idea that has come on and off the table over time,” says Dr. Roukaya Kasenally, a democracy scholar at the University of Mauritius, “any reduction of the minimum voting age should be accompanied by developing voters’ education about the importance of the vote. Unfortunately, in Mauritius there has been no such thing”. A debate is necessary either way on this issue within Mauritius: “The minimum working age is 16 years,” Collen points out, “so if somebody can work and sell his or her labour, they should have the right to vote.” On the other hand, the recently-passed Children’s Act puts the minimum age of marriage at 18 – going back to where it was in 1981 before it was lowered to 16 in 1984.

2) Problems in attracting the young

In many ways, such calls to extend the franchise to younger voters are an indication of the problems that traditional political parties have in attracting younger voters. “Mauritius is a very electorally-conscious country with a significant section of young people disaffected with the traditional political parties,” argues Collen, “so lowering the voting age can be seen as a way to interest younger voters in things political.”. The issue is the manner in which traditional parties themselves have abandoned the types of things that they used to attract support from the young in the past. 

By the 1970s, Mauritius was going through a population boom thanks to the efforts by the colonial administration in the 1940s to improve health and educational services as well as malaria eradication campaigns. A glut of younger people coupled with limited jobs in a monocrop economy made for fertile hunting grounds for political parties, which attracted and retained younger supporters through things like public forums organized by sports and youth clubs, public and neighbourhood meetings and an array of party newspapers. However, this began changing by the 1990s. “Since then, there has been no notion of engaging or educating voters, and politics became all about some sort of exchange between voters and political parties,” argues Kasenally. 

In the 1970s, a candidate in an election tearing a banknote in half and giving one half to a voter and asking him to collect the other half after an election was a part of Mauritian political folklore. But in recent times, such political mercantilism has become all too common. It was after the 2005 election that Mauritius saw its first conviction of a candidate for electoral bribery. And a report authored by Kasenally in September 2020 detailed how politicians lamented of the kinds of routine electoral bribery that they had to engage in: the report estimated that for the 2019 election a voter could demand between Rs 5,000 and Rs10,000 for a vote. Politics is now about exchanging votes for promises of jobs, state land leases and business permits. Not exactly the type of stuff to supercharge idealistic younger voters. 

The second problem is that traditional parties, most of them tracing their histories back to the glories of the 1930s and 1970s, have a hard time generating enthusiasm amongst younger voters who have seen them only in their post-1990 incarnations. “That old 1975 generation of schoolchildren who protested are now pensioners themselves,” says Collen, “since then you have had a generation and a half of people who have become disconnected with these parties.” 

Just getting ever-younger people to vote is not a solution in itself, Collen warns, “during 1975 when the minimum voting age was 21, people had a hard time keeping schoolchildren out of politics even though they could not vote”. The problem, it turns out, lies elsewhere.

3) Chasing the old

The main issue of the disconnect between younger voters and the political mainstream is that, quite simply, younger voters are just not that important anymore. If the youth bulge of the 1970s marked the radicalism of the politics at the time, current mainstream politics is stamped by the demographics of an ageing population. One of the lowest birth rates in the world and increasing longevity have translated into Mauritius becoming a rapidly ageing society: Statistics Mauritius estimated that in 2021, pensioners made up 18 per cent of the population. By 2023, just ahead of the next general election, they will have become 20 per cent of the population, and 35.4 per cent by 2054. It’s already one of the oldest countries in Africa: the average African is 19.7 years old, while the average Mauritian is 37.5 years old. “The elderly are obviously a vote bank you cannot turn your back on,” says Kasenally. 

For the traditional parties this lesson was hammered home after 2004 when it came to the state pension – the Basic Retirement Pension (BRP). This was introduced back in 1951 by the colonial administration. Mauritius had little land to give out to retirees to guarantee them a minimum standard of living after they left work and the economy dependent on exporting sugar as cheaply as possible meant that neither could Mauritius afford to pay Mauritians enough for them to invest in contributory pension schemes themselves, so the BRP came about as a solution. By 1974, the BRP had become universal and paid to anyone above 60 years of age. But with Mauritius ageing, by the early 2000s, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were already warning that the growing ranks of the elderly were making the BRP increasingly unsustainable. 

So, in December 2004, the then-MMMMSM government decided to introduce a means-test for the BRP: anybody earning more than Rs23,000 from other sources after retirement would not qualify for the BRP. The result was a disaster: out of the 110,000 pensioners then in the country (in July this year that number had grown to 249,873), only 4,000 were taken off the BRP rolls while the opposition Labour Party was handed a cudgel with which to beat the government, eventually beating it in 2005. “The whole opposition was against this notion of targeting and the MMM-MSM bloc lost an election on that,” argues Collen. 

Since then, traditional parties have pretty much followed demography: with the elderly being the fastest growing vote-bank in the country, traditional parties have increasingly pandered to it. First by refusing to reform the pensions system: between 2005 and 2014, the Labour Party refused to implement its own plans to raise the retirement age for the BRP from 60 to 65. And then by actively courting them: during the 2014 election, the MSM was swept into power partly by promising to increase an already-unsustainable BRP to Rs5,000. But it was the 2019 election that really showed how beholden traditional politics had become to chasing elderly voters. “At the last election, this reached dizzying, crazy proportions,” says Kasenally, “it really started looking like an auction for elderly voters.” 

The MSM first promised to hike the BRP further to Rs9,000 (and eventually to Rs13,500) followed by the Labour Party and the PMSD that put their bid at Rs10,000 and the MMM that promised to bring it to Rs9,000. All of these were the same parties that at one time were themselves warning about the unsustainability of the state pension system. And it has continued since then. In March this year, the Leader of the Opposition, Xavier-Luc Duval, urged the government to hike the BRP by another Rs2,000 as the way to cope with galloping inflation. 

“Mauritian politicians are really good at parcelling voters, first on the basis of ethnicity, and now increasingly on the basis of age,” Kasenally adds. Left out in the cold are, of course, the young.

4) Will lowering voting age solve the generational rift?

One way, it can be argued, of rebalancing this lopsided obsession with the elderly is to increasingly allow younger people to vote. On the face of it, this looks like a workable solution given what happened the last time the voting age was lowered, from 21 to 18 years back in December 1975. That step meant that 70,000 more young people could vote and the proportion of voters under the age of 25 grew to 60 per cent of a total electorate of some 500,000 people. This measure helped galvanize the MMM, then the party of the young, and helped it emerge as the largest single party in parliament in the 1976 elections, and it took a post-election alliance of everybody else to keep it out of power until 1982. 

Looking for a similar effect by lowering the voting age today just won’t work simply because Mauritius is just too demographically different. Had the voting age been lowered to 16 ahead of the last election in 2019, this would have meant adding just 39,222 potential new voters in a much bigger electorate of 941,719. Put simply, the new 16- and 17-year-old voters would have just accounted for 3.9 per cent of voters scattered across the country, unable to swing any elections. And with time, the importance of these younger voters is only set to shrink further: the number of 16- and 17-year-olds would just be 33,913 by 2023, and a mere 24,466 by 2038. Add to this the fact that each year an average of 1,800 young, working-age Mauritians emigrate and it looks increasingly far-fetched to rely on extending the franchise to everyounger voters to attempt to correct the traditional political parties’ neglect of them in favour of courting the elderly. 

This is the generational paradox within traditional Mauritian politics today: promising ever-higher pensions to the old is seen as a winning electoral strategy, but all this will come at the increasing expense of fewer and fewer younger voters who will have to pay more taxes to sustain the system, but who have a shrinking political importance in terms of votes. Today, for every pensioner, there are five working-age Mauritians sustaining them. By 2050, there will be just two for each pensioner. Nor is simply importing younger, working people through immigration a real solution: “Mauritian history has been propelled by the search for cheap labour,” says Collen, first by slavery, then indenture, and then foreign labourers for factories. And each new wave of immigration has roiled the politics of Mauritius, creating new divisions and tensions. 

Even today, largely powerless, voteless factory labourers from Bangladesh are routinely scapegoated by some political parties for their woes. That rules out largescale immigration as a solution without upsetting the delicate ethnic balance within Mauritian politics. Nor do the traditional parties have anything in mind to replace the mass-employment that was generated at one time by sugar and textiles to provide employment to the young. “They just have nothing to offer to the younger people, in particular,” says Collen. 

But there are dangers with continuing with such thinking, argues Kasenally, “mainstream parties might think that the young are electorally and politically less significant, but they will be the ones paying for the promises being made. This short-termism and populism might work for a while, but in the longerterm, people are going to wake up to how damaging all this is”.