As a 'young' (28) person who recently (just under two weeks ago) had a general election in my country, this being the first one I ever participated in, I can shed some light on my thoughts on this matter. First and foremost, the total voter turnout was around 50% of our population, so there's that. While we don't have a defined two party system like other places, for all of my life there have been primarily two political parties that have had a back and forth with governance. As I've gotten older I've taken it upon myself to become more educated with respect to our politics because I care about the direction that our country goes, and that led me to the position I took in the last election. Just as a side note, for the most part our politicians rarely ever talk about issues when they're campaigning, short of some vague promises to make things better. It's usually just a sh*t slinging contest.
So first up, the previous government. I was thoroughly disappointed in their performance over the last five years. They handled Covid well enough, but prior to that, there wasn't anything I could point to and say that I was pleased with what they did. Their rhetoric for most of the past five years has been 'Well the previous government did this, so we've had no choice but to do this', basically passing on the blame to the previous regime despite it being years later. There was no way I could bring myself to support them, as there was nothing there for me to support.
Next up, the opposition. Now if you asked me this question in January, I would have said I would be voting for them with 100% certainty, and a lot of people thought at the start of the year they would sleepwalk to a victory, as so many people were dissatisfied with the performance of the government at the time. And then Covid came along, and they just started shooting themselves in the foot over and over and over. They kept on saying the most ridiculous things, like we shouldn't go into lockdown, we can't close the bars etc, it was all just opposition for the sake of opposition, without any sort of thought behind it. During the campaigning for this election the leader of the opposition went so far as to say that if she wins, then she plans to re-open our borders, all of this while Covid is hitting harder than it has since the pandemic began! Absolute madness! Added to that, some of their advertisements were outright racist, which I did not predict they would stoop to at all. Looking at the bigger picture, they adopted a very Trumpian style of campaigning, even going so far as to adopt one of his slogans, MAGA, and use our country name in it. So again, no way I could support this.
These two are the two major political parties, and neither of them deserves my vote. What am I to do then?
The other political parties include one led by one Jack Warner, who I believe should be rotting in a federal jail right now, another led by a guy who genuinely comes across as if he has schizophrenia on his social media posts. Once again, what am I to do? Well, the answer is what I actually ended up doing.
A few people started a political party called THC and went up for the election. They only contested a few seats, and I'm still convinced that they did this completely as a joke as they didn't campaign or anything short of posting a few photos on Facebook, but, they were the ones I ended up voting for. They were the only ones that wouldn't hurt me as a person to vote for. I can't get behind this 'lesser of two evils' philosophy that people try to parrot, especially when there's barely any actual difference between them.
The previous government ended up winning the election, and more power to them. I think a large part of what mobilized their supporters was the outright racist rhetoric that the opposition took, combined with the actual madness they had been spouting. I hope that the next five years are better than the five that came before it. At the end of the day, I've lived through both governments in my life and very little has changed on a day to day basis when things have changed hands between the two of them, which is quite a popular line of thought in the country, and why a lot of people don't vote.
Voter apathy is a serious problem, but what is the solution? The only solution will be to get better politicians. Politicians that actually care about the people, and want to make things better, not ones who care about lining their own pockets. Politicians that people can actually look at and say that this person represents who I stand for as a human being. The young generation in particular, who are faced with the second 'once in a generation' financial crisis of their young lives. Who find it impossible to get on the property ladder. Who struggle to find gainful employment in a world that has an ever growing wealth disparity, all while being told that they're too soft, and they need to work harder, as if they haven't been forced into being cogs in a system deliberately set up to exploit them and keep them where they are to feed the pockets of the upper class, and who most likely work just as hard, if not harder than the generation before, but aren't as lucky with the conditions around them. Young people who have seen politicians and governments come and go, and nothing actually change for them, probably only continuously get worse. How can you look at someone like that and say that because they don't vote they don't care. What is there to care for? Which guy stands on TV and tells you things will get better if you support me, all while not knowing if you can afford food for the next month?
What is there to vote for if nothing ever changes? You can turn it around and then say that if you exercise apathy then surely nothing will change on it's own, but then it becomes a vicious cycle of life being the same whether you vote or don't vote.
