PUP Confident of Landslide Victory in Upcoming Elections

The People’s United Party (PUP) says it is confident of an overwhelming victory come the general elections on March 12. For some weeks now, the public have seen the soft launch of the PUP campaign both on mainstream media and social media.  Today, a more aggressive approach can be seen as not only are standard bearers flooding the local talk shows, but recorded adverts and theme songs can also be hear.  On The Morning Show today, PUP Chairman Henry Charles Usher took the air time to speak on several accomplishments of the Briceno Administration.

Henry Charles Usher, PUP Chairman: ‘I always refer to it in terms of three R’s. We had to rescue the economy, right? That was number one, to rescue what was happening. Secondly, we had to recover. We had to go through our recovery phase. We had to make sure that all our financials were put back in order. We had to make sure that the economy was roaring again. We had to make sure that we dealt with unemployment, that we brought down the unemployment rate. We had to make sure that we were working with all of our different partners in the social sector to get everybody on board with the plan. And then after the recovery comes the repositioning. And that’s where we are now. We’re repositioning the Belizean economy to take advantage of the 21st century opportunities, to take advantage of where the world is moving, to take advantage of where Belize’s niche markets are, to make sure that we protect our traditional markets but certainly diversify into new markets. And I think that is where we are right now. We’re trying to build a robust economy, an economy that can withstand external pressures. We know that we continue to import a lot of goods so the cost of living is something that we have to deal with. We import it just like how we import products we import the cost of those products. And that’s why the cost of living for food products in particular remains high. And we have to really look at that to make sure that we are working towards that. But you have seen so many different methods and policies put in place to try to deal with that particular issue, including the removing stamp duty and mortgages, the GST free weekends, raising the minimum wage to $5. There are so many, the threshold for income tax raised to $29,000. Those are all supply side, government side initiatives to reduce the cost of living until we can make sure that we can produce what we eat, or we can produce what we need. We still import too many products as a country, but certainly we are working towards building that robust economy where we can take care of our needs here at home. And I think that is where we’re moving towards in the second term.”

Usher stated that the party is working to finalize a date for the launch of its manifesto and spoke on the party’s national convention set for this weekend. 

Henry Charles Usher, PUP Chairman: “The dates are still to be decided. Actually, we like to, we do things properly in our party. And so we have to have a meeting of the national executive to decide on these dates. The last national executive that we had two weeks ago decided on February 16. That’s what we’re going with we’ll probably have one again very soon, either in person or at least by acclamation and we will then decide on all of the dates of the rallies for the launch of the manifesto. etc. Nomination day is coming up. Now remember, according to the legislation, nomination day has to be 15 to 21 days before election day, which is the 12th. So it is being held 15 days before on the 24th of February, that is a Monday. Nomination is from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the day for candidates in each constituency to be nominated. As per tradition, the incumbent government is going in the morning so we will be going between 10 and 12. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen in the afternoon because that has still not been sorted out by the other side. But what has been, what was traditional was that the opposition party goes in the afternoon. And of course there’s a time for the independents that can go between 12 and 1.”

The party has held endorsement conventions for all of its 31 candidates.