Mottley has advantage after one year in office, suggests Belle

Renowned political scientist Dr George Belle says Prime Minister Mia Mottley succeeded in disrupting the rebuilding plans of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) by calling early elections last January but now has a bigger test ahead of her.

“The greater test is the success in the rebuilding and the implementation of policy now – that is the real ultimate test,” the retired Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences Dr George Belle told Barbados TODAY as he assessed the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) administration’s first year in office since the January 19, 2022 poll that it won in a second consecutive clean sweep.

He said that outcome of the early poll has given the Mottley-led administration an advantage that it continues to hold with the DLP still not yet at full strength.

“She wanted to achieve two things – one, to disrupt the rebuilding of the Democratic Labour Party, and two, to use the opportunity for taking fresh guard because in a sense she felt that two years at least had been stolen from her mandate [due to COVID-19] and she wanted to recover that and she also wanted to disrupt the other party,” the political scientist said.

“I think in that sense, she achieved those two goals.”

According to Dr Belle, as Mottley pushes to implement policy in this second term in office, “in a sense she has a free hand” to do so.

“Although there is a lot of critical comment out there about various things, she has a free hand because you have an opposition that was defeated at the parliamentary level,” he said. “To that extent, she has a free hand to seek to achieve, at least her short-term goals.” 

The former university lecturer noted that while Barbados seeks to recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, news of a resurgence in tourism augurs well for the BLP administration.

“If that is a signal of how we might be able to navigate the immediate future, well then that should be something of promise for the Barbados Labour Party. I don’t see any challenge of any significance to [Prime Minister Mottley] for the time being,” Dr Belle contended, adding that any emerging challenge would depend on the success of the DLP in rebuilding itself. (EJ)