Election Resilience-The Case of Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne
I call it ‘resilience,’ it is a buzzword that is closely associated with climate change. It means ‘able to take a hit and keep standing or even bounce back.’ I also associate it with elections. Resilience is part of my study of Prime Ministers in the Eastern Caribbean assessing the data on what causes them to last long in office.
Election resilience is in my book the ability to lose seats in one election cycle but gain seats in the subsequent cycle. It is necessary for long, long tenure.
At year ten of his tenure, in 2014, Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit lost three seats to an insurgent Lennox Linton-led Opposition United Workers Party (UWP). At the very next election cycle, in 2019, Skerrit gained three seats to climb back to eighteen. Eighteen out of twenty-one is an overwhelming mandate. Skerrit losing three seats in 2014 was major. That’s because in the cycle before, in 2009, he accomplished what no other Dominica Prime Minister had—he increased his majority while in office. The trend was to lose seats in a general election while in office.
Skerrit’s election resilience was helped by his campaign of building climate resilient homes in Dominica following the devastation of Category Five Hurricane Maria in 2017. His election resilience demoralized the Opposition. In 2022, Lennox Linton resigned as UWP Political Leader.
In Antigua and Barbuda, Prime Minister Browne suffered this same setback—losing seats at about the tenth year, too. This is normal in the Eastern Caribbean. Regimes tend to last at least two terms, a maximum of three. At the end of the second term, they take a nosedive. Resilience, the ability to turn that downward arrow upward again calls for the Prime Minister to reconnect with the people like he or she did in better times. Can PM Browne do it? His ability to turn his political fortunes around, reconnect with the electorate and regain seats lost will determine not only his political future but his legacy.
