The Barbados Labour Party (BLP) won a landslide general election 30-0 on 24 May 2019. The result was an unequivocal rejection of the last Democratic Labour Party (DLP) government. After 10 years of being governed by a government with negligible political stock, Barbadians changed the script by giving the BLP an unprecedented victory at the 2018 poll.
The landslide victory has provided fodder for political pundits for another reason. A strong democracy requires a coherent and constructive dissenting voice. Ideally in our bicameral composition of parliament is where a dissenting view is designed to be most effective.
At recent count there were 20 known political parties registered to serve the people. Of the parties on the list 8 contested the 2018 general election. Believe it!
As a keen observer of current affairs, the blogmaster observes that 20 months since the 2018 general election, no third party party has emerged to challenge the two major political parties. In fact if you remove the two major parties – DLP and BLP – from the list of known political parties, you are left with the People’s Party for Democracy and Development (PDP) and Solutions Barbados (SB) that have remained active post 2018 general election. The PDP is the official opposition and SB the third party which secured the most votes outside of the two major parties in the 2018 general election. The United Progressive Party (UPP), Bajan Free Party (BFP), Barbados Integrity Movement (BIM), People’s Democratic Congress (PDC) have been missing in action.
The simple analysis forces two questions :-
- How can the citizenry force the major political parties to re-engineer in order to better serve the needs of the people?
- How can citizens with the characteristics to improve the quality of public service be encouraged to offer themselves for public service?
The blogmaster invites you to join the discussion.