Vanuatu candidates begin coalition shopping

Updated September 8, 2008 16:25:25

While an official declaration of results from Vanuatu's general election is still about a week away, negotiations for coalition partners are already the talk of Port Vila. Another coalition government looks inevitable for the new 52 member parliament.

Presenter: Geraldine Coutts
Speaker: Australia Networks Pacific Correspondent, Sean Dorney

DORNEY: Yes Barak Sope who for many years has represented one of the four seats that are returned from the constituency of Avata rural, that's the island on which Port Vila is based, as a separate Port Vila electorate, but everywhere else on Avata, they vote for four candidates or four members of parliament and Barak Sope has held one of those seats for a long time. It looks as though he is coming fifth. Final results are still a couple of days away, but I spoke to Mr Sope this morning, and he's saying that if he loses by a handful of votes, then he is going to take the matter to court.

What he is saying is basically is two things. One is that he claims a lot of his supporters who turned up with their voting cards were denied the right to vote, and he says if it was only 10 or 12, he wouldn't matter, but claims that there are at least 100 of his supporters who were refused the right to vote on the 2nd September, when the election was held. The other complaint that he has got is that he is alleging that the Vanu'aka Party shipped quite a number of people of Tannese origin, people from Tana, out of his electorate, out of both Port Vila and Avata down to Tana where the Vanu'aka Party had significant victory. They won four out of the seven seats in Tana and what Mr Sope is claiming is that voters who should have voted here on Avata, even though they are originally from Tana, were re-registered in Tana and shipped down there to vote. So he's trying to collect the evidence and if the results do show that he is in fact lost this seat, he says he will be going to court to challenge the results.

COUTTS; What about the results now, the ones we know, has that created the horse trading or the Coalition hunting that will inevitably go on?

DORNEY: Oh of course, yes and there are still probably one or two seats that still we don't know the final results in.

According to the Daily Post this morning, a deal was done over the weekend between the two major parties in the current Coalition, that's the Vanu'aku Party and Ham Lini's National United Party to stick together to try to form the next government. Now the votes that they have won in their own right would add up to about 18, but they are claiming that they also have the support of a number of other parties and independence and the claims are that they are already very close to that magic number of 27 votes which gives you just over the half the votes in the 52 member parliament.

Mr Sope contests that. He told me this morning that his Melanesian Progressive Party, which has two seats returned has gone into partnership already with one of the former governing Coalition partners, that's Maxine Karakoram's Vanuatu Republican Party, and that there's going to be a Coalition formed between those two parties and Verge Vohore's UMP and they claim that they are confident of gathering all the smaller parties together and being able to form a government behind Maxine Karakoram. So we're in for a week or two I think of this sort of claim and counter-claim and the situation can change not only by the day, but probably by the hour. But parliament has to meet as I understand it within two weeks of the final declaration of the poll, and Barak Sope for one is expecting that declaration to be probably around about Friday.