Have you seen the light or have you sold your soul?

Every party has its way of looking at things from their perspective. These perspectives are usually quite narrow and at the end of the day, it boils down to – if you are not with us, you are against us. This is especially true of the bigger parties in local politics as the fight for supremacy on the islands gather momentum. While the Linyon Demokratik Seselwa always accuses the United Seychelles of implementing the; ‘ek nou pa ek nou’, approach; of late it has itself been adopting a stance which is almost the same thing.

According to the LDS, if a person changes his political affiliation to follow LDS, then that person has seen the light. However, if one of its sympathisers or supporters changes side and goes to support the United Seychelles or another party, then that person is accused of having sold his soul.

This seemingly two pronged approach has led to supporters especially the diehards, from both sides of the divide to constantly hurl abuse at each other through social media, with no regard for the fact that every person is entitled to his or her right to affiliation. One example of the bitterness in this fight is the case of Speaker Nicholas Prea. Speaker Prea had a fall out with his party LDS because he didn’t give in to their bullying tactics. It is as yet unclear what the real issue was, but the result was that he was harassed and harangued throughout the last year of the mandate of the 6th National Assembly and this harassment came from his own side!

When there was much speculation as to who the running mate for the US presidential candidate would be, Prea once again became a target for ridicule by the LDS fanatics. Hardly a day went by that he wasn’t accused of selling out, of being a traitor and so on. The man was able to stick it out until the 6th National Assembly was dissolved by order of the President, but even when the running mate was announced and it definitely wasn’t him, there was no apology coming his way. Instead the focus of the insults shifted with speculations that he would be a US candidate for the parliamen-tary elections or that he would be standing as an independent candidate in the constituency where he has consistently won three times. Again all these proved to be baseless, but the haranguing con-tinued with the new attack being that he would be endorsing US’s Danny Faure through a party political broadcast.

Prea has not only  been the butt of such attacks. After Patrick Pillay announced that he and his par-ty would be supporting the US candidate, a hate attack was once again unleashed on the man who actually stuck his neck out in 2015, created a party which pulled enough votes from the US prede-cessor PL to make LDS win a 15/10 majority in the legislative elections. 

This apparent no tolerance for any opinion which does not tally with theirs is making people won-der what exactly would LDS do if they do win the presidency in the elections in three weeks time?