With General Elections officially 16 months away, Saint Lucia’s two major political parties have launched their campaigns. The ruling Saint Lucia Labour Party (SLP) is calling on supporters to protect its massive July 26, 2021, win, and the opposition United Workers Party (UWP) is calling on voters to reverse its humiliating 13-4 loss (now at 15-2).
Having to choose at least 15 new candidates, the UWP last weekend launched five, while the SLP a week earlier announced its general theme for the next poll will be ‘Protecting The Victory!’.
The UWP has found it difficult to rebound organizationally and is counting on high hopes that voters will change government again for a fifth consecutive time since 2006.
But the SLP-led administration’s overall delivery and performance during its three years and seven months in office has been winning it deserving plaudits even from opposition supporters, forcing the UWP leadership to count more on negative criticism and partisan propaganda than offering positive criticism and new and/or better challenges for change.
Seeming to be ‘Opposing For Opposing Sake,’ the UWP concentrates on reviving unsupported claims of corruption targeting government ministers while taking the government before the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) over the island’s Citizenship by Investment Programme (CIP).
Each of the administration’s three budgets presented by Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre has seen more spent on everything from subsidies of food, fuel and transport costs to creation of more jobs and youth employment opportunities, improved health services, rescuing long-overdue infrastructure projects (including hospitals and highways, air and sea ports) and investing the most by any government in the continuing fight against crime.
With the UWP to find another ten candidates, SLP supporters would have reason for optimism.
But Prime Minister Pierre and the SLP are taking no chances – and no voter for granted.
The SLP, with 15 victorious past candidates sitting in parliament and government, hasn’t started talking about launching new ones, but there are indications there can be run-offs, including in cases where sitting MP’s may decide not to contest again.
One senator has indicated interest in challenging an elected MP in a constituency won from an opposing MP, while at least four potential candidates are known to have eyes on the seat of a former prime minister – who’s won six consecutive elections and hasn’t indicated disinterest in contesting a seventh time.
However, as per usual, the SLP has to take local political history into account and learn from past experiences, which continue to underline that run-offs need at least one essential rule for success: candidates and supporters must unite behind whoever ultimately wins the candidacy.
Historically, both parties have seen run-offs in which the losing candidates and their supporters refuse to throw all their support behind the winner, resulting in the winning candidate losing the level of support needed to win the seat.
The SLP is also up against a major UWP online propaganda offensive (highly contributed to by supporters abroad), while the government has been concentrating on letting its actions speak its words.
But all this is about to change: the SLP is now also officially in elections mode and will be ‘putting its house in order’ for the next poll.
The upcoming elections will either see the SLP again breaking the historical trend of voters changing governments after each election, or the UWP benefitting from that inexplicable historical trend that gave each new government the same 11-6 majority in three successive polls (2006, 2011 and 2015).
The SLP, led by Pierre, broke that 11-6 trend with a winning 13-4 margin in 2021 – the second worst defeat the UWP suffered since 1997, when Dr. Kenny D. Anthony led it to a 16-1 electoral slaughter.
But just as local politicians of all ilk have mastered the traditional art of playing to the public gallery and only saying and promising what they think the voters may want to hear, the Saint Lucia electorate has also become more sophisticated than those who call them ‘The masses’ – but treat them like without the ‘m’…
No one expected the SLP to lose the 2006 general elections after its first two terms, but the electorate voted for a UWP led by a born-again octogenarian who’d resurrected himself from voluntary retirement to spend another year in office and power before sudden death.
PM Pierre lived through all the post-independence elections before finding and keeping the winning formula for the Castries East constituency – like Dr Anthony also winning six consecutive times and much-alike his Dominica counterpart Roosevelt Skerrit and Saint Vincent’s PM Dr Ralph Gonsalves.
No one has been able to explain the four consecutive election changes with similar results between 2006 and 2011 in a multi-party system governed by secret balloting, so anyone seeking to return to the same old result after the same electorate changed its mind so radically in 2026 will only be engaging in wishful thinking.
Such politics has been overcome by a still-very-mysterious electorate that seems to revel in making such politicians spit in the sky with eyes wide open or wash their hands and dry them in dirt.
Aware of all this, the politician inside Philip J. Pierre will never allow him to take any voter for granted, hence his party’s insistence on all members ‘Protecting the Victory’ by ensuring that not only every supporter vote, but that as many new voters and new supporters are won, every day in each constituency – including the two represented by the UWP.
Meanwhile, as I end this article, one of my sons sent me a brief TikTok video under the headline ’Politics in Saint Lucia!’ – a vagrant on a city sidewalk, urinating in his hands and using the precious liquid to wash his buttocks.
I laughed at the cryptic cynicism, but this is also a nation, like every other, where – as noted recently by a veteran journalist and publisher – ‘Every fool has (a right to) an opinion!’
So, there…