General election: Barbados’ Labor party can govern alone

Barbados has only been independent since the end of November – now the young state has held parliamentary elections. Prime Minister Mottley’s Labor Party won outright. She has to face several crises.

Prime Minister Mia Mottley won all 30 seats with her Labor Party in the general election in Barbados and was thus confirmed in office. Mottley was sworn in for a second term. She preferred the election on the grounds that the Caribbean state was deeply divided and that unity was needed.

Actually, the next elections should not have taken place for about a year. There had been much criticism for this from the opposition, which had tried to halt the elections at the last moment, as many Barbadians would stay at home because of the rampant omicrom variant.

First female head of government

Late last year, Mottley attracted a lot of attention when she declared Barbados’ independence from the British Crown and declared the small Caribbean nation of 300,000 people a republic. In the previous election in 2018, she became the first female head of government in the Caribbean island state.

The country is suffering from the consequences of the pandemic and the associated slump in income in the tourism sector, on which the country depends to a large extent. At the last UN climate summit in Glasgow, Mottley called urgently for the countries particularly affected by climate change, including Barbados itself: 1.5 degrees of global temperature rise is the limit that the small island states could cope with to survive – two Degrees are her death sentence, she warned.