Barbados votes 2018: Mia savours whitewash
Published:Friday | May 25, 2018 | 12:00 AMJanet Silvera
Victorious Barbados Labour Party (BLP) leader Mia Amor Mottley says the general election which saw her party trouncing the incumbent Democratic Labour Party (DLP) was the most significant since the country’s Independence.
Mottley and her team gave the Freundel Stuart-led DLP a thrashing winning all 30 seats up for grabs.
Mottley, 52, becomes Barbados' eighth prime minister and the fifth female head of government in the English speaking the Caribbean joining the late Dame Eugenia Charles of Dominica, Janet Jagan of Guyana, Portia Simpson Miller in Jamaica and Kamla Persad Bissessar in Trinidad and Tobago.
While on the campaign trail, Mottley kept asking, “Barbados, what do you want to wake up to on the morning of May 25th?”
The people answered with 100 per cent confidence by giving her all the seats including the DLP strongholds of St Lucy, St John and St Philip.
“This election will determine the direction of our country, whether there is a new dawn or whether we continue on the path of politicians doing poorly and the economy continues to contract,” Mottley told journalists hours before the results were announced.
Mottley thanked the people of Barbados for heeding her party’s calls to go out early in their numbers to vote.
“There has been a lot of passion on the part of people for their country. People feel that in many instances this is [the] most significant election since Independence,”.
“It is as if they couldn’t wait to vote,” said Mottley of the electors who turned out.
“I was buoyed by the interaction with people throughout this campaign, and even as we walked about, there was the suggestion that they feel that their future tomorrow morning (today) should be a new dawn,” said Mottley.
According to Mottley, the most important thing now is the economy, while building a path to transformation because we believe that Barbadians can do far better than they are doing now.
She used legendary sports star Jamaican Usain Bolt to drive home her point.
“The truth is Usain Bolt once said that he runs against himself and I think in this campaign we tried to run against ourselves to do what we thought was right, in order to have been able to do what we thought the country needed”.
Stuart has accepted responsibility for his party's defeat and has announced that he is quitting representational politics.
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