Any political analyst would say that the MMM is past history and its members whether young or old have lost their true militancy and reasons for what the party stood and fought for. Both the recent polls in the legislative and municipal have shown to what extent this party has fallen to the lowest level in its history.

Even with the MSM as partner, the MMM was defeated and wiped out from areas where it used to be unbeatable. Where did the MMM go wrong? As this party stands today, apart from its leader, the true militants have left years ago. Structurally there is no MMM. What we see today is only a different or fabricated MMM with lots of make-up.

Today most of its members are men and women of wealthy background who just joined the party as opportunists. As prime minister once, its leader, Mr Paul Raymond Bérenger travelled in a Rs4m limousine and listened to no laments of the poor but instead payed too much attention to the rich. So by wooing capitalism, the MMM became an anachronism of its time. It has drifted away from the ideology it advocated in the 1970s. Gradually the whole party was converted to conservatism instead of being a political force to do with syndicalism and the struggle of the working class as it used to be in its heyday. The MMM is already seeing the mirage of victory ahead in the long desert it is now crossing.

Politics in the Mauritian context functions in an awkward way. Most voters do not concern themselves with policies and ideologies of political parties. Politics to them is self-gratification and a sort of welfare organization to boost their living conditions. Therefore, good politicians know how to politicize the voters’ demands and exigencies. This is where the MMM-and its alliances failed .

Another example of the MMM’s failure was their bad governance of ghetto areas such as Vallé Pitot, Tranquebar, Plaine-Verte, Roche-Bois and Cité La Cure where lay their diehard customers. For the past thirty years they have been in power there to reform those areas of exclusion where poverty, drugs, prostitution and other crimes existed and still exist today. However, nothing was done at all to bring development to those areas except one or two new infrastructures built up on the eve of elections, which have no bearing on the poor citizens there.

Homeless people found themselves living by the foot of the mountains at Vallé Pitot as squatters. Hawkers were persecuted in town by police just because they wanted to earn a decent living for their families. Small retailer shops had to close down due to the exorbitant cost of permits. The poverty gap was widening all the time. The rich became richer and the poor, poorer. Tension was mounting in those deprived areas till the die was cast in both the recent general and municipal elections. It appears that it will be a very long time before the MMM can gain public confidence sufficient enough to oust Ramgoolam’s Social Alliance from power.

All political pundits have already said it loud and clear that the MMM in its present state represents nothing on the political scene. The MMM will find it difficult to reinvent itself because that party no longer answers the social and philosophical needs of the population. Today it does not stir any political aspiration and passion in its supporters, many of whom have stopped listening to its leader.

All those electoral post-mortem reflections and analysis the MMM carried out recently were fruitless and in vain. The MMM did not even know why it had lost. Its new plan to reinvent itself is like appealing to its old ghost of its heyday. So can the MMM re-invent itself ? . Only time will tell.