A One-Seat Majority Not Feasible In Antigua and Barbuda…St.Johns Has A Problem

In Antigua and Barbuda’s January 2023 general election, the ruling Antigua and Barbuda Labour Party of Prime Minister Gaston Browne eked out the narrowest win possible, a simple majority of 1 seat. Out of seventeen seats in the Lower House of Representatives, Browne’s Labour Party has nine to eight spread across the Opposition. 

Question is: Is a one-seat majority feasible in the long term in Antigua and Barbuda? I say it is not. This story has played out throughout the Eastern Caribbean over time. In Dominica, for example, it has proven not to be feasible.

In 1990, then Prime Minister Mary Eugenia Charles, with ten years under her belt obtained a similarly narrow victory, a one-seat majority, eleven seats in Dominica’s twenty-one seat House of Assembly. It proved to be a death sentence for the Iron Lady’s Dominica Freedom Party (DFP). In the very next election cycle, in 1995, her DFP fell to Edison James’s insurgent United Workers Party. Ironically, James’s victory would mirror that of the Iron Lady in 1990. James won eleven seats when he captured the government in 1995. His simple majority, too, eleven out of twenty-one, turned out to be a death sentence. By 2000, the very next election cycle, James lost his majority to a post-election coalition led by the late Prime Minister Roosevelt Douglas. The DFP has been out of Parliament since 20005. The United Workers Party built by James is today, twenty-three years after losing governance, still trying to find a path to power. It continues to stumble. In the last election cycle in Dominica in 2022, the UWP maneuvered itself out of the Parliament altogether.

The late Prime Minister Roosevelt Douglas learned that lesson. After winning 10 seats in 2000, he formed an alliance with DFP, adding their two seats to create a feasible majority at 12 seats. Douglas found that 12 was still unfeasible in a government of national unity. So, he ‘bought’ a thirteenth seat from a third party to create greater feasibility. In Dominica, a simple majority is not feasible for two reasons. One, a simple majority seems so vulnerable, it attracts every conceivable challenge. Two, the incumbent government tends to lose seats at each subsequent general election.

In Antigua and Barbuda, like Dominica, and the rest of the Eastern Caribbean, the political issues, and electorate are similar. They mirror each other. Since the general elections in December 2022, the Antigua and Barbuda Opposition has been testing the resilience of Browne’s government, with walkouts from Parliament, protest action and threats to destabilize the Prime Minister’s cabinet. The writing is on the wall, a one-seat majority is a problem for St. Johns. How Browne chooses to handle the problem and whether he has the political agility to turn the situation around and increase his margin, is what’s left to be seen.