Who will be the PUP’s Belize City Mayoral Candidate ?

An announcement from the PUP Secretariat is coming soon …. It’s the third time we’ve heard that this week as the party seems hesitant to say whether they will be endorsing Mayor Bernard Wagner as its candidate in the upcoming municipals.  This week, the Prime Minister danced around the question, hinting that an endorsement is imminent for Wagner.  Meanwhile, the PUP Chairman, Henry Charles Usher, refused to speak on the issue when they exited a National Executive meeting on Monday.  Today, Deputy Prime Minister, Cordel Hyde, would not give a straight up response on Wagner’s endorsement, but would only say that it would be ideal to have both Allan Pollard and Bernard Wagner in the upcoming Belize City slate.

Cordel Hyde, Deputy Prime Minister: “We have what ? A hundred and twenty five candidates for like sixty seven seats there about ? So we are kind of popular right now as opposed to back in 2018 when we had to be begging people and we’ve had years where we had to beg people when we can’t get people to run now we have a really nice problem we have more candidates than we have seats and so in some cases we’ll have endorsement conventions in others we will have contested conventions but you know a political animal like me conventions either contested or endorsed are a really beautiful thing. In the case of Belize City we’ve spoken to multiple of the mayoral candidates, we’ve had multiple conversations and I think we’re pretty close to making a public announcement as to what’s the direction. Ultimately we want both of these guys on the slate they’re heavy weights and we need to get both of them on the slates. I think if we can get two for the price of one that’s a very beautiful things and they deserve to be there so we’re trying to finalize that and we should have an announcement pretty soon.”

Mayor Bernard Wagner is currently serving his second consecutive term at the Belize City Council.  He won the mayorship in 2018 and in 2021.