By: Staff Writer
August 6, 2021
A prominent Caribbean political pollster and strategist was “surprised” by the large swing against the St Lucia government in the July 26 elections, but not surprised the then incumbent United Workers Party (UWP) lost overall. COVID-19 policy had a lot to do with the size of the loss.
Peter Wickham, director of the Caribbean Development Research Services (CADRES), a political research company told Caribbean Magazine Plus that it was “fairly clear” that St Lucians didn’t want the leadership of Allen Chastanet and the UWP anymore. However, the wide swing towards the St Lucia Labour Party (SLP) was “surprising”
Mr Wickham said: “I had the opportunity to step back and make an analysis of the outcome and what was scary to me is that the writing was on the wall, probably from day one.”
Massive protests in St Lucia against the former UWP government started in earnest in 2018 and the anger and mistrust of Chastanet continued to build, particularly off of the back of the now deceased Gordon “Butch” Stewart, founder of Sandals Resorts International, and his apparent sweetheart relationship with the Chastanet government.
“I think Chastanet could have saved the situation if he had called the election for last year September. The data that we had showed he would have won in September,” said Mr Wickham.
However, as the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic began to set in, people became wearier of the Chastanet government as the pain of economic restrictions and loss of freedoms began to sink in.
Mr Wickham said: “I think he became a casualty of the COVID-19. It is normal for governments in their first term to lose support, and in my sense Chastanet was not going to be a leader like Roosevelt Skerrit in Dominica, Chastanet would have been a leader who lost support and because of that support that he lost it would have been something he would have had to measure and a leader like that cannot survive a crisis like COVID-19.”
It all came down to the timing of the election Mr Wickham added in that if Chastanet had called the election when the COVID-19 was still a new pandemic he would have stood a better chance. “Governments in the onset of a crisis always gets high marks, but as the crisis like a hurricane or in this case as the COVID-19 lingered on, they start to appear dysfunctional to voters as people begin to feel upset with the pace of either the recovery or the assistance they feel they should be receiving,” Mr Wickham said.
As it stands now, the SLP now holds 13 seats and won 50.14 percent of the majority vote to the UWP’s two seats and 42.91 percent of the vote.
It was so bad that the UWP lost seats to independent candidates making history in the Caribbean by electing two independent candidates to the 17-member Parliament, among them being the former prime minister Stephenson King, who quit the then ruling UWP to contest the Castries North constituency as an independent, which he has been representing for nearly three decades and the other was Richard Frederick a lawyer and senior politician who won Castries Central.