What Mauritian Voters Want on December 11

By and large, a Government with about 35 MPs and an Opposition with 25. They don't want a Government with a lot more seats because then it will start having funny ideas and do some really stupid things. Like messing up an excellent constitution. And they want policies that work for a majority of their fellow citizens not the kind of nonsense that we've seen since 2005.

It now appears that none of the two major political blocks -- thank God! -- will win three-quarters of the seats. Although Labour/MMM won all the seats in 1995 with 65% of the votes. In fact a little data analysis for that election -- which happened two decades ago -- will reveal that all we need for that alliance to shed 25 seats is a displacement of less than 16% of the voters. And about a 13% movement of voters should prevent them from grabbing 75% of the seats.

Shifts of these magnitudes have happened before. For example in 2005 LP/PMSD got 12.7 percentage points more votes than they had five years earlier. And the issues were not as important as they are now. For a hint of the kind of shift that may happen in a week we need to look at the change in the sum of the share of votes the IP and the PMSD received in 1967 and 1976. 44%.

Sithanen and 5 Colleagues From Cabinet Sidelined

So we learned this afternoon when Ramgoolam announced the names of his 59 fellow candidates. The five ministers not on l'Alliance de L'avenir's list are Asraf Dulull, Indranee Seebun, Dharam Gokhool, Mahen Gowresoo and Sylvio Tang.

There are 13 women candidates (21.6%) on that list with riding no.4 having only female candidates. Berenger's alliance have picked 8 women (13.3%) or 5 less.