These recent elections brought forward all the best and worst in our candidates that we have come to expect, along with some others thrown in just for the heck of it. So, in recognition of these peculiar qualities, and without further ado, Weekly is proud to present the campaign awards 2014!

BEST PLOT TWISTS :

Paul Bérenger

From fiery oppoisition leader to supplicant, to unsuccessful pole for opposition parties to gather round, to finally government partner and seeming future prime minister, Paul Bérenger filled the year with endless twists and policy u-turns, finally leaving even his own supporters confused. Trying to make friends of enemies and enemies of friends, Bérenger has done it all, and all to begin as leader of the opposition to end up as…leader of the opposition. Now the question arises once again: who are his friends and who are his enemies? Hindi soap operas could have been more convoluted.

BEST BLAST FROM THE PAST :

Vishnu Lutchmeenaraidoo

Lutchmeenaraidoo seemed safely ensconced in political semiretirement, out of power and ignored by his own party, the MMM. That was until Anerood Jugnauth reached down and pulled his political career from the grave. With his political career successfully emulating a zombie that refuses to stay dead, now it’s moving on to try to become a time machine and transport us back to the good old 1980s when things were good, apparently.

BIGGEST REVERSAL :

Navin Ramgoolam

The year has not been kind to the former prime minister, who at the beginning seemed to be the Teflon man, with scandals and assorted indelicate rumours seemingly not being enough to dint his popularity. By the end of the year, however, he had lost much of his steam, forfeiting not just the government, but also his own seat in parliament. Call it hubris, ill-luck, dreams of being an all-powerful president or sheer fatigue amongst the people, that does not change the fact that the once-over mighty prime minister has suffered the biggest reversal in the country. As the saying goes, stretch your legs only as far as your sheets allow.

WORST DEVOTEE :

Sandhya Bhoygah

Bhoygah is iconoclasm at its best. At one point painting Ramgoolam as a divinity, but when ignored for her trouble, goes and joins his enemies, going from extreme worship to extreme hatred, Bhoygah’s apostasy seems to have paid off in getting her elected into parliament. Will she now switch gods once again when the attention runs out? Only time will tell.

BEST GENERAL :

Raj Dayal

From promoting himself to the rank of General in the 1980s, Dayal has now landed at the Environment Ministry. Whether he can tell the difference between a cruise missile and a cucumber is not relevant. What better man can there be to wage war against anything – including pollution? And as the protector of species, he can finally add another title to his ever-growing and disparaterésumé: Lord of the Beasts on Earth and Fish in the Sea. Doesn’t seem like such a random posting now, does it?

BEST LONGEVITY :

Sir Anerood Jugnauth

It’s not easy being an 84-year old, let alone also trying to steer an oddball alliance of political orphans into power, but Anerood Jugnauth not only managed to do it, but do it in style. Now his main concern in his twilight years is not how to struggle to be remembered, but rather how to share the national cake among all his partners. His opponents meanwhile, touting their relative youth yesterday and urging Jugnauth senior to retire gracefully, are now themselves being bombarded with demands to retire. The magic elixir which has resuscitated Jugnauth is called people’s anger. He should be wary of it.

BEST DOUBLE-FEATURE :

Xavier-Luc Duval and Adrien Duval

This father-son duo is impatient with history, not waiting for the more conventional method of sons succeeding fathers when they retire. Instead, the father and son both are in the same party at the same time. And with the likes of cousin/uncle Thierry Henry also making it to parliament, the PMSD benches increasingly look like a family reunion.

BEST RETREAT

Pravind Jugnauth : 

Pravind Jugnauth is proof of the Peter Pan complex. The junior Jugnauth has struggled to fill his father’s shoes after he  was bequeathed the MSM and then managed to fall from finance minister to leader of the opposition (without a parliament of course) in a couple of years. Although the MSM is now the most powerful party in parliament, as MSM leader, Pravind Jugnauth has been relegated to a relatively minor Technology Ministry. With his father serving as the grand old patriarch of the ruling alliance, that’s left many wondering how much pull Pravind really has and if he will ever be able to step out of his father’s shadow.

BEST REINVENTION :

Rama Sithanen

Sithanen has really seen a dramatic reinvention of his image this year. From the finance minister fired in 2010, accused of making the rich richer and the poor poorer, the very people to have chucked him out of power now projected him as the next great hope for the country’s fortunes. Unfortunately for Sithanen, however, the Labour Party and the MMM that were trying so hard to reinvent Sithanen, weren’t paying enough attention to their own images.

BEST ARCHITECT:

Alan Ganoo

Tirelessly shuffling between leaders, conveying messages, helping draft laws and attempting to smooth over cracks, Alan Ganoo seemed to be on the cusp of achieving the impossible: help establish an alliance between historic rivals and rejigger the entire structure of the state in the process. But, as any architect knows, even the most intricate and complicated plans fall apart when there isn’t enough cement (votes) and the building materials are no good. Oh well, full marks for effort, though.

BEST ONE-MAN SHOW :

Cehl Meeah

In the eternal shuffle of coalitions and alliances being made and broken, there’s just one man who has never asked to tango with anybody and that’s the FSM’s Cehl Meeah. This election too saw Cehl left out in the cold. But not one to take rejection badly, Cehl declared war on everybody, putting up candidates everywhere. That neither this latter-day Leonidas battling the hordes of just about everyone else, nor any of his candidates actually won is a topic for another day.

BEST FAMILY DRAMA :

Mario Bienvenu and Eric Guimbeau

Things didn’t go so well in the MMSD family this year. Mario Bienvenu quit the party to join the Labour-MMM bloc, in a move that Guimbeau characterised as a child of the house being lured away by tall promises. But now that Bienvenu has found that he backed the wrong horse and Guimbeau has lost his parliament seat, leaving the MMSD in power nowhere, will Bienvenu return to Guimbeau’s paternal embrace? In the meantime, however, Guimbeau is hedging his bets by discovering that Anerood Jugnauth is suddenly a ‘mahatma’. In return for such high praise, all he is asking for is new municipal elections so that his party can get into power somewhere. Oh well, family politics is always complicated.

BEST MUSICAL CHAIRS :

Shakeel Mohamed

He’s the one parliamentarian we almost didn’t get. After being denied a seat in Port Louis, Mohamed was shunted off to constituency number 15. But activists there thought that Mohamed might steal their thunder, so he was grudgingly (and to prevent a rebellion by his supporters) then brought back to number 3. The irony of it all is that the he was the candidate that no one really wanted and, despite all the constituency hopping, he was the only one actually elected!

BEST TEAR JERKER :

Vasant Bunwaree

Like a jilted lover who finds faults only once the relationship is over, it was only after he was passed over by the Labour Party and not given a ticket that Bunwaree suddenly discovered that the party was actually rotting from the inside. So he did what any good political doctor would do: first he published all his achievements as a minister hoping to get attention that way, then after he was passed over quit the party to found his own and began tearing into the Labour hoping that he would be given a ticket by a Labour Party looking to do damage control. His efforts seem to have been in vain, however, since neither he nor, as it turns out, those he was supplicating actually got elected. Not quite sure what the lesson here is but now both sides have plenty of time outside of power to figure that one out.

DEFLATION :

Reza Uteem

Reza Uteem was looking like a Chinese rocket this past year. After just one term as a parliamentarian, his political career looked to be going through a meteoric rise with him becoming number 3 in a second republic and given a ‘super ministry’ that included everything except the kitchen sink. At one point, Uteem even began pontifi cating on issues of the day and speaking as if he were already in power. Ultimately, however, as went the Labour- MMM alliance, so were dashed Uteem’s hopes. Evidence once again that there’s no shortcut to the top. Now the only question is how long it will take Uteem to come back down to earth.

BEST FLIP :

Ivan Collendavelloo

When Ivan Collendavelloo slammed the door on the MMM to make his own party, many expected he would become like all the other factions that broke with the MMM, relevant for a time but then disappearing into obscurity. This election proved, however, that Collendavelloo backed the winning horse, becoming vice-prime minister in the process and doing what no other MMM rebel has done before: beat Bérenger in his own turf. Now it remains to be seen whether his lucky streak will continue once the MSM rocket that’s propelled Collendavelloo’s newly founded Muvman Liberater to power is no longer there.

BEST CARROT : 

Indranee Seebun

The quickest way to a voter’s heart is through his pocket. After Dhiraj Khamajeet, Indranee Seebun was the latest to attempt to test this hypothesis. This year saw her engaging in what is quite a questionable way of fishing for support. Whether she was standing from the wrong party or was a case of offering too little too late, Seebun’s attempt at well-time compassionate generosity doesn’t seem to have done the trick. Like any object of affection, voters probably expect a little more subtlety. Just ask Khamajeet, oh wait…

BEST COSTUMES :

Michael Sik Yuen

He’s at it again. The poster-boy for Mauritian multiculturalism gone wrong, Michael Sik Yuen once again attempted to defy the laws of biology. After being in parliament since 2010 posing as a member of the general population community and a PMSD Member of Parliament, Michael Sik Yuen donned the garb of a Sino-Mauritian candidate from the Labour Party. Sik Yuen’s endless racial reincarnations this time even prompted one frustrated citizen to take him to court over it. Problems like Sik Yuen will probably be around for as long as the best loser system exists. But now that he’s not succeeded in getting elected, astrologers and betting outlets must start drawing odds on whether Sik Yuen plans to fight next elections as a Hindu or a Muslim.

BEST PEACEMAKER :

Rundheersing Bheenick

The governor of the Bank of Mauritius has gained quite a reputation for crossing swords with successive finance ministers. Most recently, his sparring with Xavier-Luc Duval turned from a bureaucratic tussle over interest rates into a blownout personalised affair. The governor’s vim and vigour seemed to be sapped, however, when the Finance Ministry was transferred under the Prime Minister’s Office. Although policy changed very little, the temper at the central bank certainly did. Evidently, it’s not what you say but who you say it to that matters.

BEST THEATRE : 

Rajesh Bhagwan

The MMM’s Rajesh Bhagwan gained a little notoriety during the election campaign for hammering against the pernicious role of socio-cultural organisations. It probably would have sounded a lot more convincing if his leader and their coalition allies were not busy simultaneously buttering up other socio-cultural organisations of their own or advertising how many such organisations actually supported them. But why did Bhagwan feel so confident that his demarche was kosher? Well, standing in No. 20, where the sociocultural organisations have little influence and which is considered an MMM stronghold means that it wasn’t a risky venture at all. The MMM’s ‘bulldozer’ prefers to stay on safe ground, it appears.

BEST AMNESIA:

Ashok Jugnauth

Everybody has the awkward uncle that they cannot get along with. But this particular uncle seems to suffer from a bout of selective amnesia. Previously allied to the MMM, after being offered a place in the Labour Party, Ashock Jugnauth was quick to forget that he had a party of his own, the Union Nationale, brushing it hurriedly under the carpet and then standing as a Labour candidate. He didn’t win. But he will soon forget that too.

BEST SURVIVORS:

Mireille Martin and Prateebah Bholah

We are aware that it’s odd to give a survivor’s award to two politicians no longer in parliament. But the award is in recognition of our amazement that they made it this far at all. Both jumped ship off the MSM to land in the Labour Party, with Mireille Martin apparently looking hapless in running the Gender Equality Ministry and caught off-guard by many a mistake and Bholah eligible for winning an award for passing a whole year without saying a word! How these two managed to reach where they did will remain a mystery that would confound even the sharpest of political analysts.

BEST REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE : 

Ashok Subron

After the now-defunct mini-amendment deflated the campaign to allow candidates not to declare their ethnicities, a campaign that Subron has utilised to remain relevant in the public eye for nine years, the feisty unionist is now in search of another hobbyhorse. He has also been deprived of the second republic after Ramgoolam and Bérenger’s flop version, and organising strikes in sugar and transport is not a fulltime occupation. So where Subron will turn his gaze next is anybody’s guess. Wanted: Lovely cause for lonely unionist. Any cause will do.

 This article appeared in Weekly’s edition of the 24th of December.