LAST WEEK’S ANNOUNCEMENT by Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit that Dominica will go to the polls on December 8 means that this region will now have the second and perhaps the last of five possible elections this year.
Skerrit’s decision to go to the polls in December is clearly strategic in the context of a constitutional schedule that would have allowed him two more months before the mandatory dissolution of parliament and a further three before the election automatically “called itself”.
Skerrit’s strategy seems logical since it satisfies the reasonable expectation that an election is due every five years and appears to have rattled the opposition, which was apparently expecting a post-Christmas poll.
The electoral scenario that faces Dominica on this occasion is quite a phenomenon for several reasons which are worth repeating. On this occasion Labour is seeking a fourth term and Prime Minister Skerrit is himself seeking a third term, although he has not yet reached the age most prime ministers are when they are elected a first time.
It can be recalled that the Dominica Labour Party (DLP) came to office in 2000 under the leadership of Rosie Douglas, who died within a year and was succeeded by Pierre Charles, who himself died in 2004. It therefore meant that the DLP lost two leaders in its first term and should theoretically have been handicapped as it approached its re-election in 2005 under the leadership of Skerrit, who, at age 31, was a “political child”.
He effectively had only a single term in parliament and was called upon to manage a coalition government.
Skerrit proved himself and enhanced the DLP’s popular majority and seat count in 2005 and again in 2009 to the point where it now holds more than 60 per cent of the popular vote and 85 per cent of the seats in parliament. Across the Caribbean, it is generally the case that political parties grow their support in opposition and once a government is formed, a natural process of erosion takes place.
The most recent CADRES poll suggested a swing of -2 per cent against the DLP, which effectively placed four of the seats it held in the balance and made the conversion of the one UWP seat in its grasp difficult. This finding could offer some amount of hope to the UWP, which has clearly made an impact on the electorate.
However, the fact that the DLP is going into the election with 61 per cent popular support means that even if it fought this election against a strong political “headwind”, it would emerge with popular support in the high fifties and with 66 per cent of the seats in parliament.
The comparison is striking since in 2008 Arthur approached the Barbados Labour Party’s fourth term with 56 per cent of the popular support and a negative outlook, while Skerrit is approaching the DLP’s fourth term with 61 per cent of the popular support and a positive outlook.
A clue to the success of Skerrit and the DLP lies in the recent poll, which noted that the preferred prime minister was Roosevelt Skerrit, who was favoured by 63 per cent of Dominicans, while Opposition Leader Lenox Linton was preferred by 37 per cent of Dominicans.
This significant distance between the two leaders is a recurring theme in situations when opposition parties have been beaten several times in any Caribbean country. In the case of the UWP the situation has been highly unstable since it changed leaders more than three times since the DLP won office in 2000 and has extra-parliamentary leadership as it approaches this election.
The Caribbean history of extra-parliamentary bids for office is not encouraging. Nevertheless, Linton has been confident of his success, and this raises some interesting questions.
In setting the bar this high, Linton might also have unwittingly set himself up to answer major political questions if he is unsuccessful in his bid. The UWP has not tasted power in Dominica since 1995 when it was elected for a single term, and it was clearly unable to identify a leader who could match Skerrit’s popularity of late.
If, then, Linton presents himself as the political messiah who can lead the UWP out of the political wilderness and he fails in his first try, the UWP ought to ask itself if it should ditch him as it did James, Green, John and Bazil.
Linton’s brash and uncompromising approach to politics is a factor that could easily lead him to be the architect of his own demise.
Peter W. Wickham (peter.wickham@caribsurf.com) is a political consultant and a director of Caribbean Development Research Services.