Sanctus – The Democratic Left Party will this week announce that the party’s leader on Sanctus City Council, Cllr Ethan Ringrose, will be their party’s candidate in April’s presidential election. The move by the party’s federal leadership team is being announced early, sources say, to discourage party infighting and state parties holding primaries. Ringrose, 48, is thought to have pushed particularly hard to be the party’s nominee after President Marian Woodstrom announced she would not be running for re-election.
Ringrose was appointed as the DLP’s Sanctus City Council leader back in 2018, and lost out to Katherine Dwight of the SCP in 2019 to become Mayor, later Governing Mayor under federalisation, of the capital city. The result was particularly tight, and Ringrose represents a much younger generation of Sanctarians and is thought to have a better appeal to new voters. Critical sources within the DLP itself, though, say that they don’t believe an ambitious relatively young politician like Ethan Ringrose seriously wants to move into a symbolic, but mostly powerless job like the presidency; one source in particular tells us that Ringrose doesn’t want to or expect to win, but is setting himself up with a much more federal profile for an eventual run at leadership of the DLP itself, and hopefully the Chancellery thereafter.
The selection of Cllr. Ringrose will be a surprise to many veterans in the party who were hoping for a party primary, with some backbench DLP deputies being forced to retire at the next election due to seat reductions post-federalisation having already given serious consideration to a move to Eagleston Manor. While Ringrose is a popular, left of center politician, and subscribes to all the major tenets of the party, some on the more left-side of the party have said if he were leading them into a federal election, they’re not sure they could support him – but as it stands, with it just being the presidential election, they’d put aside policy differences as there is no policy impact with the presidency. Already, though, it does not bode well for any future Chancellery ambitions he may have if that is his long term plan.
JOEY SESSIONS, Political Editor