PPA and CPA parties merge for elections

“Voters of St. Maarten we are one week away from postulation day where political parties will submit a list of 1 to 23 candidates maximum to the Main Voting Bureau. Leaders of political parties are busy trying to put their lists together with the best possible candidates in order to attract as much votes to their party as possible while candidates are jockeying for the best position they can achieve.

There are an amount of 14 parties according to the Electoral Council that has registered for the upcoming elections that will be held on September 26, 2016. We found that it was very fitting and in place to inform you now of our intentions before postulation day to inform you of our decision to join forces and not to run alone because we must keep you up to date of what we are doing for this election. You deserve to know because we depend on your support. You are the real bosses. We could night find the time to inform you before because were busy looking for opportunities for our young people so that they would in turn be able to live their dreams. This we believe was very important. Our young people are our greatest asset and therefore as a party we thought it very necessary to give them our undivided attention. We were able to take a gospel group to Curacao were we won the group category at the Caribbean Gospel Song Festival.

We were able as well to assist in taking a group of 15 young men to Birmingham, Alabama to compete in an International Baseball Tournament where we came Sub Champions and were able to attract a number of college coaches and baseball scouts who showed interest in our boys because of their talent, disciplined and dedication which they displayed during the tournament. We are also in the process of working on a Youth Development and Training Center whereby we intend to develop and train our young people by teaching them life skills that they subsequently would be able to use in order to become a more productive citizen.There are some people that would say that we initiated these projects just to be elected but I say to the people that are spreading this rumor: Time will tell if we care for our next generation are not. People of SxM you know what we stand for and that is solely to build our people so that they are able to live in a better St. Maarten. We believe that there are too many political parties that will be running for office on our 16 square miles island SxM.

Because of the abundance of parties we believe it will be even more confusing for the electorate to choose and therefore the CPA leadership together with its board decided to join ranks with the People’s Progressive Alliance (PPA) who we believe we would be able to work with because of its strong, consistent and decisive leader, Miss Gracita Arrindell among other areas which we will further disclose this afternoon at our press conference.

We know that there will be persons that would have questions regarding our decision to run this election on the slate of the PPA. Therefore we have decided today, Monday, August 1 to hold a press conference at the PPA headquarters on the Front street which is located after Mid Town Hotel. This press conference will commence at 2.00 pm. We invite anyone that is not working and has the time, to be present at our press conference so that they would be able first hand to hear from both leaders of PPA and CPA why we decided to come together. We will also be holding a Social Gathering later in the evening from 7.00 – 9.00 pm at the John Larmonie Center to give supporters and the general public alike an opportunity to hear the reasons of why this combination is workable and strong and to get an idea of the vision that we will be presenting to the electorate. We respect our people and therefore we will be listening to you today both at the conference and at our Social Gathering. See you later and please don’t miss it because your future depends on it. We are all about building YOU, the PEOPLE which is our greatest asset. YOU are above all parties and its leadership. Long live St. Maarten and may God bless you.”