IN a republic, the head of state takes the form of an Executive President. So this is the kind of President proposed in our constitution. Political parties will contest at general elections on the existing Proportional Representation (PR) system. When a party puts up a slate it will be entitled to name one of its candidates on that slate as its presidential candidate, which has already been completed.
If the party obtains more seats in the National Assembly than any other party, its presidential candidate will become President. When voting for a party each voter will know that he is voting for the presidential candidate supported by the party. The names of the presidential candidate will therefore have been before each voter’s mind at the time of voting. In this real way therefore, the President will be directly elected by the people. Despite an electoral system of government and a political structure rooted in strong ethnic alignments.
The party’s political strength, and its drawbacks, rest in the resources of its supporters. Such a political structure where a minority holds political power can only be explained in terms of the evolution of the institutional interests of the different groups. Such interests are deeply embedded in the country’s history as a colonial plantation society. Burnham and D’Aguiar on the other hand, proposed a change to the system of proportional representation (P.R.) in the National Legislature.
After election in 1964, the PNC with 40 percent of the votes and the UF with 12 percent formed a coalition government under the new P.R. system and the constitution remained to this day with some minor changes. The existing constitution is what is known as the Westminster type of constitution. In itself such a constitution is neither good nor bad. Whether it is good or bad depends upon its suitability for the nation which imports it. To resolve this issue it is necessary in a preliminary way to observe that Westminster constitutions are in broader sense members of the family of constitutions spawned by the intellectual matrix of the non-socialist Western world.