KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves, who has led the Caribbean nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines into an alliance with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, won a narrow victory in parliamentary elecitons Monday to keep his party in power for another five years.
His United Labour Party won just eight seats, down from 12 in the previous Parliament. The New Democratic Party increased its share to seven seats from three.
Opposition parties had hoped the islands' economic hardships would bring a change in government, although recent opinion polls gave the edge to Gonsalves and his party.
Voters across the two islands waited in long lines to determine as Gonsalves predicted he would win a third term.
The prime minister said he is best suited to lead the country of 120,000 people as it tries to rebound from the global economic slump. The 64-year-old leader touts a record of poverty reduction and improved access to education while forging deeper ties with international partners such as Venezuela and Cuba to survive a tighter budget.
Under his leadership, St. Vincent was accepted last year as a member of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Nations of Our America, a leftist bloc that includes Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Dominica, and Antigua and Barbuda. Chavez assembled the bloc of allies in Latin America and the Caribbean to counter U.S. influence in the region.
St. Vincent has also forged a closer relationship with Iran, which sent $7 million in aid for several local development projects in 2008.
The New Democratic Party cited an economy in poor health and argued Gonsalves has an autocratic style of leadership. The party's candidates also pledged to weaken the country's ties with Venezuela and Cuba.
A third party, St. Vincent's Green Party, fielded 13 candidates but they had not been expected to be competitive with the lineup from the two major parties.
Election supervisor Sylvia Findlay was recently quoted in a St. Vincent newspaper as saying that roughly 100,050 names were on this election cycle's list of registered voters. In 2005 elections, there were 91,033 names on the official registration list.
NDP leader Arnhim Eustace asserted at a political rally prior to the elections that 20,000 of the people on the lists were actually dead.
No one answered the telephone at the election supervisor's office Monday.
The Organization of American States and the Caribbean Community bloc both sent observer missions to monitor the elections. Preliminary results were expected early Tuesday.
KINGSTOWN, St Vincent, Monday, December 13, 2010 - After almost a month of anticipation, the voters of St Vincent and the Grenadines will today decide whether the United Labour Party (ULP) will return to power for a third consecutive term.
Since Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of the ULP called elections on November 14 and dissolved Parliament the following day, both his party and the Arnhim Eustace-led New Democratic Party have led strong campaigns in a bid to woo the electorate.
At stake are the 15 constituency seats in the House of Assembly, of which the ULP has held on to a 12-seat majority since both the 2001 and 2005 general elections. Noted Barbadian pollster Peter Wickham predicted on the weekend that the ULP would retain its grip on power, albeit with a slimmer majority, as polls indicated the ULP had seven secure seats, while another five marginal seats could go either way. Wickham predicted that the NDP could only guarantee the three seats it won in the previous election and would also have to fight to gain traction within the five constituencies that were up for grabs. The much smaller Green Party has also nominated 13 candidates to contest the 15 seats but no major upsets are predicted as a result of this and pundits are still calling the election a two-horse race.
Supervisor of Elections Sylvia Findlay-Scrubb announced that a record 101,053 voters out of a population of around 110,000 people have been deemed eligible to cast their ballots in this years general election, which was constitutionally due by March 2011. A high voter turnout is expected and political analysts have speculated whether this will signal a similar 1984 turnaround when the incumbent St Vincent Labour Party was routed by an 89% voter turnout that saw the NDP swept to power, and then remain there for an unprecedented four terms.
The 64-year-old Gonsalves has led a campaign based on the accomplishments of the ULP over the past two terms primarily reduced unemployment, improved economic growth and a network of developing diplomatic relations that have brought investment inflows and other benefits to the archipelago.
However, the 65-year-old Eustace is banking on the momentum gained from the defeat of the Gonsalves-backed 2009 constitutional referendum to propel his party into power. The trained economist has been attacking the governments stewardship of the countrys economic fortunes and has assured the electorate that the NDP also has the connections to bring investment and job security to the country. He has also decried Gonsalves Leftist relations Venezuela, China and Iran as holding the country up to international scrutiny and suspicion.
Despite the public optimism of victory by the two leaders, both parties have accused operatives on either side of marring this election campaign with sporadic violence that has not been a prominent feature of past St Vincent and the Grenadines elections. Both leaders have sought to distance themselves from the violence that has shocked Vincentians at home and abroad and have promised to crackdown on those found responsible.
The Organization of American States and the Caribbean Community have both announced observer missions to St Vincent and the Grenadines to monitor the elections.
