If there’s one rule about Caribbean elections in the 2010s, it’s that you should bet on the incumbents being tossed out by restless electorates. 

It happened in Jamaica, where voters turfed out prime minister Portia Simpson-Miller in February 2016. It happened in Trinidad and Tobago in September 2015, when Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s government fell. It happened to Tillman Thomas in Grenada in February 2013, and it nearly happened in Barbados to Freundel Stuart in February 2013. (The one exception is the Dominican Republic, where president Danilo Medina, one of the most popular leaders in the Western Hemisphere, easily won reelection with nearly 62% of the vote in May 2016).

It has now happened in The Bahamas on May 10, when voters ejected the ruling Progressive Liberal Party of Perry Christie, who had served as the country’s prime minister since 2012 and who held power again between 2002 and 2007. The nominally center-left PLP faced the wrath of voters angry about rising economic and social problems that have worsened — not abated — under Christie’s government for the past five years.   Continue reading Christie and PLP swept aside in Bahamian landslide →