The question is hardly new. It returns with regularity, like a refrain embedded in the political DNA of the Mouvement Militant Mauricien (MMM): will the party split again?
History suggests that the MMM has never fractured by accident. Each rupture has followed a familiar alignment of forces - centralisation of authority, erosion of internal debate, generational fatigue, and the gradual conversion of a movement into an apparatus.
The most recent trigger was a 34-minute monologue press conference delivered by Paul Bérenger on Monday. As often in politics, the images mattered as much as the words. The leader was the sole speaker at the table. Around him, the Politburo conveyed contradictory signals. When the monologue - or talk show - ended, only Rajesh Bhagwan remained by his side. For historians of political parties, such scenes are rarely anecdotal. They are symptoms.
At the start of 1992, the MMM split again. The Nababsing episode, the injunctions over symbols, colours and legitimacy, and the eventual creation of the RMM were not merely legal skirmishes. They were contests over ownership of the party's soul - over who embodied the MMM. As the party entered the 1990s, it became evident that identity - who speaks for the movement, who inherits its legitimacy - had become as important as ideology.
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The pain of those years, documented in memoirs and internal testimonies, reveals a recurring pattern. The MMM does not fracture for lack of discipline; it fractures because it is caught between its founding myth as a mass democratic movement and the gravitational pull of charismatic, personalised leadership.
That contradiction has never been fully resolved. Fast-forward to 2018-2019. The confrontation with Steve Obeegadoo marked a decisive inflection point. When l'express published the editorial. Il faut sauver le soldat Steve, it was not defending an individual but a principle: freedom of expression within a party that had long described itself as "the most democratic in the world".
Obeegadoo's interview in l'express - tellingly titled Il faut sauver le MMM - gave voice to what many militants felt but no longer dared to articulate. After nine consecutive electoral defeats and a collapse of the MMM's vote share to around 14% in December 2017, the party faced an existential dilemma. Instead of opening a debate, the leadership opted for discipline. A motion of blame. A vote. An attempt at silencing.
The arithmetic mattered. Twenty-one votes for Bérenger. Five against. Two abstentions. For the first time in years, dissent was visible, measurable and impossible to wish away. The Bureau politique was suspended mid-meeting - a rare and revealing gesture. The MMM was no longer monolithic. It was internally fractured, even if the fracture had yet to become formal.
The marginalisation - or expulsion - of Obeegadoo was widely interpreted as the symbolic elimination of a potential dauphin. Parties anxious about succession often behave this way. Historically, it is the reflex of organisations that begin to confuse continuity with permanence.
2019: the dynastic turn
The 2019 general election brought a deeper malaise into sharp relief. Paul Bérenger was accused - by his own militants - of indulging in a form of dynastic politics alien to the MMM's original ethos. On the party's electoral list appeared his daughter Joanna, his son-in-law Frédéric Curé and his sister-in-law Dany Perrier. Within the party, comparisons with Mugabe circulated - not as slogans, but as unease.
The charge was not nepotism alone. It was the growing perception that access to candidacy, influence and future leadership had become increasingly familial, relational and closed. In a society of interconnaissance such as Mauritius, the claim that biological proximity does not compromise political independence is difficult to sustain.
This dynastic drift coincided with another contradiction. Bérenger - an acknowledged practitioner of "scientific communalism - continued to calibrate ethnic and caste balances with precision, even as Mauritian society itself was visibly changing. The streets, the schools and the Jeux des Îles told a different story: a country increasingly capable of thinking as Mauritians first, while much of its political class remained trapped in older reflexes.
The crisis did not unfold in isolation. Across parties, Mauritian politics since the mid-2010s has been marked by the capture of regulatory institutions by political or familial networks: the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC), the Financial Services Commission (FSC), the central bank, the ICTA and the Gambling Regulatory Authority (GRA). Appointments have blurred the line between regulator and partisan actor.
The MMM was born in opposition to precisely this system--against concentration of power, opacity and elite collusion. When it begins to resemble what it once denounced, the ideological cost is severe.
The Mugabe analogy, invoked by militants and intellectuals alike, is not about bloodshed or dictatorship in the literal sense. It speaks instead to political ageing, isolation and the slow transformation of a liberator into a gatekeeper. As historian Stuart Doran has shown, Mugabe did not fall because of external enemies, but because internal factions concluded that "he ate the whole cake and left not even crumbs." He survived for decades by mobilising sovereignty, liberation credentials and international indulgence--until his own entourage turned on him.
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The lesson is structural rather than moral. When power becomes personalised and succession is blocked, loyalty turns tactical, silence replaces conviction and betrayal becomes a rational strategy. By 2024, only 14 women featured among the MMM's 60 probable candidates. Younger cadres increasingly felt that positions were gardées. Anecdotes - doors slammed in Politburo meetings, public reprimands over symbolic authority - are not trivial. They are indicators of generational dissonance.
The MMM was once a party in which young militants felt history flowed through them. Today, many feel history is being withheld.
Historically, the MMM splits when three conditions coincide:
- Leadership centralisation without renewal;
- Suppression of structured internal dissent;
- A widening gap between the party's ideals and its practices.
All three conditions are present today.
A split is not inevitable. History rarely is. But unless the MMM confronts the question it has deferred for decades - succession, internal democracy and adaptation to a transformed society - the greater risk may not be rupture, but something more corrosive: slow irrelevance.
The MMM was created to challenge dynasties. If it becomes one, history may not be kind - but it will be consistent.
