Ruling Party in Trinidad Wins; Challenge Likely

Prime Minister Basdeo Panday’s ruling United National Congress scored a narrow victory in Trinidad and Tobago’s general election, but the opposition appeared set Tuesday to launch a legal challenge of the results.

The UNC won 19 parliamentary seats and its main rival, former Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s People’s National Movement, won 16 seats in elections Monday in the oil- and gas-rich republic of 1.3 million people in the southern Caribbean. The minority National Alliance for Reconstruction won a single seat. Panday and Manning each easily won reelection to their seats.

But even as Panday claimed victory, Manning said his party would file court documents challenging the candidacies of two UNC winners on the grounds that they submitted false papers relating to their citizenship.

The PNM said two victorious UNC candidates, calypsonian Winston “Gypsy” Peters and retired geophysicist Bill Chaitan, filed false nomination papers Nov. 20 in contravention of the Representation of the Peoples Act, which says no candidate can have allegiance to any other state.

In addition to their Trinidad and Tobago citizenship, Peters and Chaitan hold citizenship in the U.S. and Canada respectively, officials said.

Manning wrote to President Arthur Robinson, urging him to refrain from appointing anyone to a new government, saying the pending legal challenge was “crucial to the ability of any political party to form a majority in the Parliament.”

Trinidad and Tobago is evenly split along ethnic lines, with just under half its people of Indian descent and the same proportion black. The two major groups usually vote along party lines--Indians for the UNC and blacks for the PNM.

Preliminary estimates put turnout at 76% of the nation’s 947,447 eligible voters.