Election of the Day: Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

Later today, the citizens of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines will elect a new House of Assembly. This legislative body has 21 members. 15 are elected in single member districts, first past the post. The remaining six are appointed by the electeds; 4 by the majority and 2 by the opposition.

SVG has long had a stable two party system. The ruling party is the Unity Labour party, which won 9/15 seats in 2020. That was the 5th consecutive election they’ve won, and their leader, Ralph Gonsalves, has served as prime minister since 2001. The opposition party, the New Democrats, are led by Godwin Friday, a political scientist whose research focuses on the political economy of development in Trinidad and Tobago as well as Bahamanian foreign policy. Ideologically, the ruling party is a party of the left, and member in good standing of the Socialist International, while the New Democrats, who dominated SVG politics in the 90’s but are facing the prospect of three full decades in the wilderness if things don’t go well today, are typically characterized as centrist, center-right, or neoliberal.

SVG politics do not appear to be particularly exciting or volitile. Gonsalves and Unity Labour are running on their record of economic development, investments in education, tourism development, and some largely performative climate justice and slavery reparations. The New Democrats are running an opposition campaign focused on cost of living, and the incumbent’s manifest failures in that regard. They have also tried to make Gonsalves’s advancing age an issue (born in 1946, he’s just a few weeks younger than Donald Trump). The New Democrats are also going after a Unity Labour strength–support for those pursuing higher education–with a pledge to eliminate all tuition and fees for enrollment in classes at the Saint Vincent and Grenadines community college.

Another issue is the “China or Taiwan” question. SVG is one of a handful of nations who formally recognizes Taiwan at the expense of a diplomatic (and economic) relationship with Beijing. The New Democrats have a history of proposing switching to China, but have been evasive and unclear on this question this time around. This is a subject of some concern for a number of voters, as apparently a non-trivial number of Vincentians pursue higher education in Taiwan. A shift would be doubly threatening–both the potential for a diplomatic rupture and the prospect of the current administration’s commitment to financially supporting Vincentians pursuing higher education could be threatened, should the opposition campaign prove successful. Taiwan is also apparently investing in a major hospital, which could also be threatened by a switch in alliances.

I have not found any polling in this small (population ~110k) country, but most coverage seems to expect a close election. The last three elections have been 8-7,8-7, 9-6, and the New Democrats actually won the popular vote by a few hundred in 2020, so a sixth term for Gonzalves should not be presumed.