Robert Buddan

Portia Simpson Miller continues to defy predictions about Jamaican politics and what to expect of her. She has already defied the view that a woman could never be elected president of a political party in Jamaica and become Prime Minister of Jamaica.

Approaching one year after becoming Prime Minister, Mrs. Simpson Miller has defied another prediction. Some thought that she would get carried away by her national popularity to engage in political populism. So many commentaries at home and abroad had used the epithet 'populist' to describe her when she first became Prime Minister.

The term 'populist' is itself very imprecise. It can refer to persons whose beliefs range from religious fundamentalism to fascism, and to democracy, and in fact to any movement critical of a status quo that preserves the privileges of the rich and neglects the needs of the poor. It can depict demagoguery or sincerity on the part of such leaders. Even American presidential candidate, John Edwards, is being called a populist because of his critique of 'two Americas'.

Leaders sometimes have to contain the populist impulses that exist within their own country because if mass expectations rise faster than the country's resources and institutional capacity can service them, instability results. Some scholars have argued that this has been precisely the reason why democracy has failed in many developing countries, causing military governments to be formed to restore law and order.

Mrs. Simpson Miller has actually been careful to resist the populist pressures from within the society. She has professed her religious faith without threatening national mobilisation of believers against some immoral and unjust order in the fashion of Sunday preachers. She has emphasised her belief in community participation in national life without promising to smash the central state, as anarchists would have.

She has repeated her belief that more benefits from investments and gains from globalisation must reach the poor without planning wide-scale redistribution of wealth, or rejecting globalisation, as anti-globalists might wish. She has insisted on the need for early childhood education and respect for family without calling for an overthrow of male systems of power and patriarchy, as radical gender prescriptions would hope.

POPULIST STYLE

Mrs. Simpson Miller has not engaged in the populist style of some world leaders either. She has avoided drawing lines between countries of the so-called 'axis of evil', and has stayed clear of the war of words used to refer to others as 'the devil'. She has not

manufactured fears of 'terrorism' and deployed the rhetoric of patriotism to detain and torture people or invade their privacyas some great democratic countries have shamelessly done.

Mrs. Simpson Miller became Prime Minister at a time when a so-called 'pink tide' of leaders critical of western neo-liberalism was being elected in the hemisphere. She could easily have jumped on the bandwagon of Hugo Chavez and others in Latin America. She had the opportunity to do so at the meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Cuba in September and the recent ACP meeting. Instead, she has stressed that developing countries must find practical solutions to poverty and build consensus and partnerships rather than succumb to division and hate.

The populist sometimes devotes himself or herself to idolatry and politics is made into a civil religion. The impression had been given that Mrs. Simpson Miller would have gone around the country talking people up in a frenzy flailing against injustice and oppression and throwing money at people in grand but unplanned schemes to make herself heroine of the poor. Nothing of the sort has happened. She has not started a class war, a race war, or a religious war.

She has not pursued popularity at the risk of everything else, as her poll numbers have shown. Had she played the populist card, Trafigura would have been a side-show and she would have called and won elections already. Neither has the Prime Minister tried to be darling of the media and if attempts at cartoon caricature and other attempts to bait her are anything to go by, the media has not accepted her as its darling either. Yet, the media remains free.

ECONOMIC POPULISM A more specific prediction was that economic instability would ensue from Mrs. Simpson Miller's populism. She has defied that as well. Throughout her campaign she had emphasised working with her Ministers as a team. As a result the confidence that Minister Davies has built up with international institutions remains in place and he says this past year has been his best ever.

The IMF, he says, has given Jamaica its best review ever. International credit agencies had expressed confidence in macro-economic stability and continuity under Mrs. Simpson Miller. She has justified this with the lowest inflation over 18 years. Investments continue to come in, economic growth is strengthening and not even the opposition has claimed that there has been election spending.

Mrs. Simpson Miller has defied the view that she did not have the education and culture to become a respected leader. It is her fellow leaders who are best able to determine her leadership ability since they are removed from local prejudices and political biases making them capable of a more objective view.

After tough meetings with fellow CARICOM Prime Ministers in February that Mrs. Simpson Miller chaired, they were unanimous in their praise of her leadership. Prime Ministers from Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and St. Vincent were impressed with her skills in listening, understanding the complexity of the issues, building consensus, moving the discussions along, and finding solutions while keeping the meetings free of tension and making the whole exercise productive and enjoyable. One Prime Minister even said he wished Mrs. Simpson Miller would chair all of their meetings.

Acknowledging that the Prime Minister was new in her responsibility for external negotiations, they felt that she had demonstrated praiseworthy leadership qualities over regional affairs and had quickly matured as a leader. As one Prime Minister said, she got the job done easily and whenever there was a clash of opinion between strong-willed leaders she was able to intervene in a calming way. Her long experience working directly with people has obviously counted.

Probably the Prime Minister's grassroots popularity comes from the same skills rather than from populist rhetoric inveighing the forces of good over the forces of evil or mystifying the problems of real people with big words and complex statistics. PULL QUOTE: [What Mrs. Simpson Miller has demonstrated is that popularity does not come from populism and that compassion does not negate reason. ]

The Prime Minister best knows what her weaknesses and failures have been. The least we can say is that one year after becoming Prime Minister Jamaica is no worse off than before. In the coming budget debate we need to hear what she believes has been the main accomplishments and failures in her first year and what targets she has set herself for the next year. She will then have to go into the next elections on this.

Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, Mona, UWI. Email: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm.