In the past week, the 15-nation Caribbean Community witnessed what was likely the last two of nearly a dozen general elections in the bloc this year with both being held within days of each other as voters returned identical results in the two.
In St. Vincent where Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves’ United Labor Party (ULP) had held power for nearly 25 straight years, the electorate told him that it had grown tired of his governance, wanted to end the era of the ULP and sent away all but one of his 15 members of parliament, some into retirement.
In neighboring St. Lucia, Prime Minister Philip Pierre’s Labor Party (SLP) improved on its previous outing, taking all but one of the 15 seats. Like St. Vincent where PM Gonsalves will be the only of 15 opposition lawmakers in the house, Allen Chastanet, the now resigned leader of the United Workers Party (UWP), will also be the only opposition legislator across the aisle from the SLP.
As the year closes, major preparations for general elections in The Bahamas and Antigua are underway, with the leaders of both only just recently ruling out setting a date for voters before 2025 ends.
As 2025 counts down, there are also political mutterings about Dominica’s long-serving Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit contemplating his Labor Party’s (DLP) future now that voters have shown the need to end the protracted governance of one party. Skerrit has been PM since 2004 and was a close colleague of Ralph Gonsalves. The two were the longest-serving leaders in Caricom.
For the year so far, governments have called elections in Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad, Belize, Bermuda, Anguilla, Suriname, Curaçao, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Cayman Islands, St. Vincent, and St. Lucia, making it one of the busiest ever on record.
But while poll watchers will be listening out for dates from PM Philip Davis in The Bahamas and Gaston Browne in Antigua in the coming weeks, encouraging signals have been emerging from strife-torn Haiti which has not held any general elections since 2016.
This means that Haiti is functioning without any elected officials as mandates have all long expired. To keep the country functioning, Caribbean leaders early last year helped to broker a transitional government, hoping it would stabilize a country wracked by gangland violence, mostly in the capital, and take it to fresh elections next year.
So, in recent days, the unelected interim administration gave encouraging signals about organizing elections in the last quarter of 2026, passing key pieces of legislation to enable fresh elections.
The bloc’s most populous nation had been preparing for elections just around the time when gunmen, in early July 2021, stormed the private residence of President Jovenel Moïse, killing him and injuring his wife. That assassination has helped create serious chaos in Haiti with gunmen creating mayhem mostly in the capital and related areas, suggesting they need to take political power.
The council has so far published an electoral calendar with August 2026 as the date for new elections for local, municipal, parliamentary seats, and for the presidency. Providing details of its plans, the electoral council says it has already embarked on a massive recruitment drive for polling day and office staff, registering more than 200 political parties, inspecting and identifying possible polling stations, and securing broadcasting agreements with radio and television stations.
A second round of voting will take place in early December if no candidate secures 50% of the vote, according to the calendar published by the council.
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