Pollster Bill Johnson accurately called the Trinidad and Tobago election for the PNM.

PORT OF SPAIN, (Reuters):

Trinidad and Tobago's ruling party easily won re-election, beating back challenges from two opponents and unrest over rising crime to keep its grip on power in the energy-rich Caribbean country.

With all votes counted from Monday's balloting, preliminary results from the national Election and Boundaries Commission gave Prime Minister Patrick Manning's People's National Movement (PNM) 26 seats in the newly-expanded 41-seat Parliament.

That fell short of the 28-seat majority Manning needed to push through proposed constitutional reforms, which his critics had branded as a dictatorial power grab.

A comfortable majority

But the 61-year-old Prime Minister told supporters in a victory speech late on Monday it was "a comfortable majority with which to rule."

The PNM draws most of its support from voters of African descent in a country where politics has long been divided along racial lines. It has been in charge of the twin-island nation for all but 11 years since the party was founded 51 years ago.

Manning, a geologist by profession, has ruled Trinidad and the smaller island of Tobago for 10 of the past 16 years and bucked a recent anti-incumbent trend in the English-speaking Caribbean.

The main opposition party, the United National Congress (UNC), which results showed had won 15 seats in Parliament, has its base largely among Trinidadians of East Indian descent.

An upstart third party, the Congress of the People led by former central bank governor Winston Dookeran and presenting itself as multiracial, competed in a general election for the first time.

While political analysts said the fledgling party had won broad support among Trinidad's burgeoning middle class, it failed to win any seats in parliament.

"The Congress of the People turned out to be a paper tiger," said Dan Erikson, a Caribbean expert with the Washington-based think tank Inter-American Dialogue.

"The spectre was raised that voters in Trinidad are ready to move beyond race-based parties and I think that turned out to be largely disproved."

Dookeran, a former leader of the UNC, grabbed the spotlight by criticising Manning for doing too little to fight criminal gangs, which have expanded because of Trinidad's growing role as a transshipment point for South American cocaine.

Meantime, pollster Bill Johnson, who does work for The Gleaner, accurately called the Trinidad and Tobago election for the PNM. In fact, Mr. Johnson who also said the Jamaica Labour Party would have been victorious in the general election held in Jamaica on September 3, said the PNM would have won 27 seats. It had won 26 seats at the end of the preliminary count yesterday.