Call it Repeat, Three-peat or Hat-trick, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley and the ruling Barbados Labour Party (BLP) scored a third consecutive General Elections victory on February 11, again bagging all-30 seats contested.
By any measure, it’s a significant political achievement for Barbados’ 60-year-old first woman Prime Minister and her party.
They were always expected to win again, but probably with less seats.
The lady leader led the 87-year-old party into its third victory, after first winning in 2018 and taking the island into Republicanism at its 55th Independence Anniversary (November 30, 2021), appointing Dame Sandra Mason as the island’s first woman President.
During that historic event attended by then Prince Charles (on behalf of his ill mother Queen Elizabeth II), the future King of England delivered his mum’s first Royal Expression of Sorrow (the writer’s description) over the Royal Household’s involvement in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
PM Mottley and the BLP sufficiently pleased voters during their first outing — enough to have won re-election for a second term – and now a third.
The Opposition Democratic Labour Party (DLP) could not have offered a worst performance and all calls today are for Party Leader Ralph Thorne to resign.
The BLP’s victory has heartened the supporters of the Caribbean’s traditional red-shirted Labour parties, which won elections in Guyana, Saint Lucia, Surinam – and now Barbados – in the past year.
On the other hand, the yellow-coded conservative parties in Jamaica, Saint Vincent & The Grenadines and Trinidad & Tobago.
The respective ‘red’ parties evolved from the West Indian Labour Parties that emerged from the trade unions formed after the1938 labour revolts across the English-speaking Caribbean, which continuously won elections in the colonial period after introduction of Adult Suffrage (The Right to Vote) in the colonies in 1950-51.
The Labour Parties won successive general elections, defeating the colonial alliances that represented the imperial presence in the post-Slavery West Indies.
Today, Barbados has two Labour Parties (BLP and DLP) from that era that keep the Westminster elections system alive on a prime island jewel that had a Westminster parliament long before England.
Interestingly, the infamous British Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson’s statue stood in Bridgetown for over-200 years, even though the colonial lord of West Indian seas never set foot on the island.
But it was taken down during PM Mottley’s second term and quietly cushioned away from the public eye.
In her first eight years in office, ‘Mama Mia’ has inscribed her name in Barbados’ history at home and abroad, cultivating and maintaining a commanding international image that qualified her to be the lead candidate, during her second term, to become the first woman Secretary General of the United Nations (UN).
But she would surprisingly announce (during a mid-term bye-election) that she’d decided to lead the BLP into a third election, disappointing global supporters for the top UN post, but pleasing those at home who feared her succession could lead to a leadership fight that could cost the party dearly at the next elections (then officially due in 2027).
As with the second elections she called in 2022, PM Mottley would call the third within four years (instead of the full five for each term), each time the DLP proving unable to mount any credible alternative platform under Opposition Leader Ralph Thorne – who won on a BLP ticket in 2022, but crossed-the-floor to the DLP and thereafter became its Leader.
PM Mottley has maintained an iron grip on the BLP and has identified with progressive causes not necessarily associated with the party’s founder Sir Grantley Adams and his son J.M.G. ‘Tom’ Adams – the latter making the island the Caribbean outpost for the 1983 US invasion of Grenada.
Seen by what one Barbadian friend described as “A smooth and learned talker with a brass-knuckled tongue”, PM Mottley’s approach to her succession of preceding BLP Leader and former PM, Owen Arthur, didn’t please some within.
As the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) PM responsible for Reparations, she’s also represented the region well.
At home, an interesting attempt to negotiate a win-win agreement with the English Drax family (based in Dorset) — involving the island’s Drax Hall Estate, owned by the pioneers of British Transatlantic Slavery in the West Indies — hasn’t yet materialized.
Commentators will conclude by the results that ‘Barbados is in good hands!’ and analysts will continue to feather Prime Minister Mottley’s plumage with all the deserving accolades for her many glowing accomplishments.
But some regional commentators – particularly the New Age analysts of the IT Generation who depend more on search engines than engineering themselves to search for historical truths – can go overboard in making claims unsupported by historical fact.
For example: while Prime Minister Mottley and the BLP’s three-peat wins were consecutive, that was not the case with Dr Mitchell in Grenada.
And as the BLP has proven political and electoral lightning can indeed strike twice — and thrice — in the same place, the PM in Ms Mottley will be well-pleased.
However, the Political Leader in her head will naturally be worried about the trend Democracy is taking in Barbados, under her watch.
The national turnout has decreased in each of the last three general elections — from 65% in 2013 to 60.3% in 2018, to 41.7% in 2022, to 30.8% in 2026.
Indeed, the 2026 turnout was the lowest in the island’s entire electoral history (from 1951), this year only bettered by 2022 – then the lowest.
It’ll surely worry the lady running ‘Little England’ that less qualified electors are voting with each passing national poll, more citizens opting instead to opt out of casting their ballots.
PM Mottley and the BLP have won the majority of the 30% of Barbadian voters who decided to vote.
But 70% opted not to vote — for or against her party – and that should surely worry any Political Leader anywhere, even if sitting pretty in parliament.