Prime minister elected

NUKU’ALOFA – Tonga should know who its new prime minister is by now. There have been two nominations submitted for Kingdom’s top job and the MPs were to have voted yesterday.

The two nominations have come from the group of independent MPs and the Democratic Party respectively.

The Nobles did not make a nomination from within their ranks.

The nominations were made before Christmas and have been kept in sealed envelopes to be opened when all the elected representatives held a special meeting to elect the prime minister yesterday.

The Interim Speaker Lord Tupou called the meeting of all 26 elected representatives at Parliament House in Nuku’alofa.

The outcome was not known as this newspaper went to press.

A winning candidate must have got more than half the votes and his appointment must still be approved by the King.

The Noble’s spokesman Lord Vaea told Kaniva News, in an interview last week, that the nine Noble-elected representatives had agreed to support the seven independent-elected MPs with their nomination – which is reported to be the most recent deputy prime minister of Tonga, Samiu Vaipulu.

The Democratic Party is understood to have nominated its veteran leader, ‘Akilisi Pohiva.

Pohiva’s supporters want him to be Tonga’s next prime minister.

They claim he has led Tonga’s opposition for about 30 years and he has proved to be reliable and trustworthy in whatever he has promised to the people.

But last week Tonga’s independent MPs declared that the prime minister must be elected from their ranks – and not the Democratic Party or the nobility.

They warned that if the Democrats didn’t support them, they would side with the nobility to form the next government.

They claimed the independents represented the popular vote and said the nobles and Democrats were minorities.

The independents represented more than 26,100 voters while the Democrats were only supported by 11,000 voters.

The nobility was voted in by just 33 nobles – and that meant Tonga’s next leader “had to be elected from the ranks of the people’s MPs”.