Thursday, December 6, 2012, would be my preferred date to hold the next Barbados general election, constitutionally due no later than mid-May 2013.
Given that the best date options have already slipped by, early December would be my choice, but may not necessarily be the Prime Minister’s.
Were Freundel Stuart a leader whose decision-making process admitted of easy comprehension, or had he been in office long enough for us to gauge his modus operandi, it would be far easier to predict with some measure of certainty what is going through his mind as the clock moves relentlessly towards that ultimate day of political reckoning.
But we do not know much about the man’s approach, except that he takes his time about decisionmaking. Like a good dressmaker or tailor, he measures twice or three times and cuts once. So we are left to wildly guess what possible date he prefers.
My December 6 selection is based on a number of narrowing factors that come into play at a time like this.
Let me start by saying Stuart’s best chance was January 2011 when he instead chose to hold a by-election in St John to fill the vacancy created by the passing of Prime Minister David Thompson on October 23, 2010.
I am in no doubt he would have handsomely won, given the outpouring of sympathy for the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) and the unpreparedness of and cracks within the leadership of the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) at that juncture.
In addition, a DLP victory at that time would have afforded Stuart the time and flexibility to deal with the creeping economic problems we saw on the horizon in 2008 and which just grew worse in the two years which followed.
Instead, he now finds himself without much wiggle room as conditions worsen for all of us who have to buy food and petrol and pay taxes. He is facing the worst of times to seek endorsement.
In January 2011, the first two years of service of the DLP would have been sympathetically examined by voters, but this window of opportunity has expanded into four gaping years during which the party’s bold manifesto promises have evaporated and been replaced by a proliferation of excuses in some very hard economic times.
Stuart surprised me by not calling a general election at that time. As a student of history, I fully expected he would have chosen to benefit from the lesson of 1986 when Prime Minister Bernard St John also failed to pounce on the crucial moment at the time of the passing of Prime Minister J.M.G.M. “Tom” Adams. Fourteen months later, the BLP lost badly.
Stuart now faces that ugly prospect. Worse, based on the near five per cent swing against the DLP as revealed by the June CADRES public opinion poll, he is staring at the possibility of leading Barbados’ first historic one-term Government. He is obviously biding his time in the expectation his Government will reverse that swing in time to retain a majority.
His second best election shot would have been to put things in place at the time of the open warfare of words between former Prime Minister Owen Arthur and his former deputy Mia Mottley for the most part of 2011. But the DLP was clearly not ready and would have surprised itself as much as the BLP had the vote been called up to the third quarter of last year.
Now the BLP seems to have healed its wounds enough that it is out there holding public meetings, lambasting the DLP Government and defining its performance. Government’s response seems to be to get two or three ministers on the nightly TV news, again ignoring the fact that this did not work for the BLP in 2008. The DLP needs to push back in an affirmative manner.
So people are asking for the election. Even a schoolboy inquisitively asked Stuart last month: “When will elections be held?”
If the DLP machinery were ready at this point, Stuart would be well advised not to prolong the matter into 2013. But he has only one 2013 option: January 22 or so.
Let’s face it. The governance of elections is determined by law and convention. And tradition also plays an important part.
The law: Section 61:3 of the Barbados Constitution sets out “subject to the provisions of Subsection (4), Parliament, unless sooner dissolved, shall continue for five years from the date of its first sitting after any dissolution and shall then stand dissolved”.
(The exception in Subsection 4 deals with the condition on which Parliament may sit beyond the five-year limit – that is “at any time when Barbados is at war”.)
• Harold Hoyte is Editor Emeritus of the Nation Publishing Company.