The New Democratic Party (NDP) is celebrating a historic landslide victory in the Caribbean country of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), winning 14 out of 15 seats, according to preliminary results.
The decisive vote was a crushing defeat for the Unity Labor Party (ULP), which has been in power since 2001.
The outgoing Prime Minister, Ralph Gonsalves, was the only ULP candidate to hold his seat in elections that saw a sharp decline in the party’s previous nine-seat majority.
Gonsalves, the Caribbean’s longest-serving prime minister, will hand over the reins to the NDP’s Godwin on Friday.
“It looks like something major has happened in Vinci,” regional political analyst Peter Wickham said on Facebook. Because it became clear that Gonsalves, a prominent climate justice and slavery reparations advocate, was going to lose the election.
Other governments in the region congratulated the result on Friday. Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who is reeling from the devastation of Hurricane Melissa, described the election as “a watershed moment for the Vincentian people”.
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Fiona Fan, Taiwan’s ambassador to SVG, also offered congratulations on Friday. The NDP has proposed first severing ties with Taiwan and restoring ties with China. However, this year’s NDP manifesto made no mention of severing ties with Taipei and the party was criticized for failing to clarify its position on the issue.
Under Gonsalves’ leadership, SVG has continued to cooperate with Taiwan on infrastructure, education, and healthcare. The relationship has yielded benefits such as scholarships, support for an international airport and help in the construction of a state-of-the-art hospital.
“Taiwan and St. Vincent share universal values such as democracy, freedom and human rights,” Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry said Friday.
Friday, 66, a lawyer, took over the leadership of the NDP in 2016 but has been in parliament since 2001.
His party promised to create “more and better-paying jobs”, address rising crime and violence, and improve healthcare and infrastructure. It also promised to follow other Caribbean countries in allowing individuals to acquire citizenship through significant financial contributions to the economy.
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SVG is the only independent state in the seven-member Organization of Eastern Caribbean States that does not grant citizenship by investment.
Emmanuel Quashie, an international relations lecturer at the University of the West Indies, attributed the defeat to several factors. He said, “Because he was in power for so long, there was a lot of anti-Ralph sentiment. True, he has done a lot in terms of changing SVG.”
“He took us through the global financial crisis. He took us through the global pandemic. He took us through the La Soufrière volcanic eruption, Hurricane Beryl and past climate change episodic events. But I think that wasn’t a concern for many voters. I also think the ULP’s message wasn’t strong enough and convincing enough because I didn’t see them relying enough on their many victories.”
The government’s vaccine mandate during the COVID-19 crisis also had a serious impact on the ULP’s support, Quashie said. The mandate, which required most frontline workers to be laid off, resulted in some losing their jobs.
In 2021, Gonsalves was taken to hospital after being hit on the head with a stone at a demonstration against vaccine mandates.
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