A deputy po­lit­i­cal leader of the Hon­esty, Op­por­tu­ni­ty, Per­for­mance and Em­pow­er­ment (HOPE) par­ty has re­signed fol­low­ing a con­tentious joint meet­ing with the Com­mu­ni­ty Ref­or­ma­tion Net­work (CRM) NGO and the Na­tion­al Trans­for­ma­tion Al­liance (NTA).

Last Wednes­day, the three groups met, but Karen Nunez-Tesheira abrupt­ly left, vis­i­bly up­set.

She lat­er con­firmed that she had been sched­uled to speak on the state of the econ­o­my but de­clined to elab­o­rate on what led to her de­par­ture.

When con­tact­ed, HOPE Po­lit­i­cal Leader Tim­o­thy Hamel-Smith re­vealed that Nunez-Tesheira was dis­pleased that her par­ty’s flags were not hoist­ed be­fore those of the NTA.

He ex­plained that the per­son re­spon­si­ble for set­ting up the flags ar­rived at 6.15 pm along­side HOPE chair­man Steve Al­varez, just 45 min­utes be­fore the 7 pm meet­ing was sched­uled to be­gin.

“All flags were put up, but by then, she had al­ready had this blowup about them not be­ing raised ear­li­er. She was re­al­ly dis­traught, I re­call. It wasn’t a mat­ter of HOPE’s do­ing, as it were. We don’t con­trol NTA, num­ber one. But two, yes, we were late. We would have liked to put up the flags ear­li­er. I think her ex­pec­ta­tions were per­haps more than we could pro­vide for.

“My un­der­stand­ing is she felt that the NTA was tak­ing ad­van­tage. I don’t think you could blame NTA for that. But that’s how she felt at the mo­ment—that HOPE’s flags weren’t there. She felt that they were just be­ing dom­i­nat­ed by NTA, but that wasn’t the po­si­tion.”

He said he hoped to let ten­sions cool be­fore ad­dress­ing her con­cerns, not­ing that he had yet to re­ceive an of­fi­cial res­ig­na­tion let­ter.

How­ev­er, Nunez-Tesheira made it clear that her de­ci­sion was fi­nal.

“I am ab­solute­ly not part of HOPE or NTA. I could tell you that,” she said.

Mean­while, NTA leader Gary Grif­fith said he was un­aware that Nunez-Tesheira had re­signed from HOPE, stress­ing that it was an in­ter­nal par­ty mat­ter.

“She was up­set that the HOPE peo­ple didn’t put up their flags on time. What I did was have the NTA peo­ple put up the flags on be­half of HOPE af­ter she start­ed to com­plain. But I have no is­sue with that—that’s HOPE’s busi­ness. We are work­ing with HOPE. We still con­tin­ue to work with them.”

De­spite the fall­out, HOPE, CRN, and NTA met again as re­cent­ly as yes­ter­day, con­tin­u­ing coali­tion talks.

Nunez-Tesheira had been a min­is­ter and MP with the Patrick Man­ning-led Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment gov­ern­ment but re­signed from the par­ty in 2023. She had chal­lenged po­lit­i­cal leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley for the lead­er­ship po­si­tion.