THE 2016 ST LUCIAN General Election found me attending the Caribbean Studies Association Annual Conference in Haiti, and as such I was neither aware nor affected by what I later discovered to be amusingly over-discussed post-election comments attributed to me by a Barbadian news reporter.
Invited to comment on the election result, Isurmised that the victory by the Allen Chastanet-led United Workers’ Party (UWP) could not be attributed to superior ideas, since it was not an ‘ideas” campaign, nor could it be attributed to the UWP’s superior team, given their relative inexperience and under-qualification academically.
Given the shock of the victory therefore, and given my relative distance, I surmised (as a first and passing viewpoint just the morning after) that money might have played a role in shaping the outcome.
Deeper knowledge suggests that the electionwas a revolt against the St Lucia Labour Party, rather than a positive affirmation of the UWP. Significantly, my own published writings on Caribbean elections in the era of neo-liberalism have presented the one-term and general anti-incumbency phenomena as a significant post-2000 feature.
Thus, despite my expectation that the Anthony administration would have bucked the trend, given the relatively unknown nature of the UWP team, there is a well established basis for understanding the UWP victory.
There is much in the Chastanet victory which suggests the deeper slippage of Caribbean politics into neo-liberal norms. For example, the same global forces which have legitimised Donald Trump’s success in winning the US Republican party’s nomination explicitly as a businessman-politician can also explain Chastanet’s daring to become a business-politician.
Not only is the neo-liberal assumption that business success is synonymous with political wisdom evident in Chastanet’s emergence, but significantly it is also pronounced in the fact that he is not historically grounded in the labour movement, the traditional left, the youth movement, nor did he have any deep and long-standing association with any of the traditional political parties in St Lucia.
The factors which made Chastanet “acceptable” and “electable”, or at the very least “inoffensive” enough to be “given a chance”, are deeply rooted in the new dominant neo-liberal environment.
Having been facilitated by the neo-liberal environment, it is expected that Chastanet’s leadership will be defined by the pursuit of pro-business policies at the expense of social policies. Uncharacteristically,a leading regional businessman was the first to issue a congratulatory message.
Already, the false promise of the abolition of VAT has been put on hold and as, in the case of the recently elected Jamaica Labour Party, more of the grandiose electoral promises are expected to be shelved.
As neo-liberalism deepens, the capitalists willbe less willing to leave governments in the handsof a non-capitalist “managerial committee”. They are now going for direct power themselves. The Caribbean working people are in for a few years of hard struggle.
•Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, specialising in regional affairs. Email: [email protected]
