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AN UNPRECEDENTED ELECTION
On Thursday May 24, Barbadians elected a new government. After casting her ballot, then opposition leader Mia Motley hit the nail on the head when she said “We got this one…Bajans have heeded the call.”
The results show that Mottley’s Barbados Labor Party (BLP) won by a clean sweep. The BLP won all 30 parliamentary seats and will form the next government without an official opposition.
The crushing defeat of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) led by Prime Minister Freundel Stuart means that at 52, Ms. Mottley will become Barbados’s first female Prime Minister.
The elections come even as Barbados is about to attain its 52nd anniversary. She is the fifth female head of state in the English-speaking Caribbean joining the prestigious list of the late Eugenia Charles of Dominica, the late Janet Jagan of Guyana, Portia Simpson of Jamaica and Kamla Persad-Bissessar of Trinidad and Tobago.
A humble Mia Mottley declared Friday a thanksgiving day of celebration and ordered the closure of all schools and businesses on the island except banks and supermarkets. In his concession speech, Prime Minister Freundel Stuart not only thanked his supporters but he also unequivocally took full blame for his party’s massive defeat.
The winning of all 30 parliamentary seats by the BLP is unprecedented in many ways in the history of politics in Barbados. It was the first time in the 52 years since Barbados independence that there will not be an official opposition in Parliament. It is the first time the voters of Barbados have elected a female Prime Minister. Despite being the wealthiest and one of the most developed countries in the Caribbean, it was also the first time that an election was held in Barbados amid challenging circumstances for the country.
The Barbadian economy had contracted in 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis. Since then, growth has been minimal as the gross domestic product (GDP) expanded by a meager 1.6 percent in 2016, according to World Bank data.
The low growth rate has led to an increase of public debt, lower foreign exchange reserves, downgrades in the island’s credit rating, highest unemployment rate at 10 percent, highest debt to GDP ratio and the lowest revenue gains from tourism.
During the final days of the campaign, the incumbent Freundel Stuart-led DLP realized that it had a real fight on its hands as Mottley’s BLP which has been in opposition since 2008 gained momentum.
A desperate Freundel Stuart opted to use personal attacks on Ms. Mottley by labelling her as incompetent, demagogic and a devil worshipper—a reference to Mottley’s supposed sexual orientation. The attacks backfired as an increasingly savvy Bajan electorate would have none of them. Prime Minister Stuart had pledged that if re-elected, he would withdraw Barbados from the jurisdiction of the Caribbean Court of Justice.
In contrast, Mottley’s BLP announced a slew of measures which caught the voters. These included an increase in old-age pension, higher cost of living allowances for public servants, and the removal of jail sentences for minor marijuana infringements.
The election victory of Ms. Mottley’s BLP party proved that the promise appealed to the old, the young and the influential middle class.
The results proved that all the pollsters wrong in their predictions. Not one pollster had predicted a whitewash. All had predicted a close election based on a very narrow swing vote factor. Their prediction that the people were discontented with the DLP-BLP duopoly in the island of 285,000 people was also incorrect.
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