Grenada’s opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has elected a new leader, Dickon Mitchell, who now has the monumental task of overturning the 15-0 seat majority held, for the second term running, by the ruling New National Party (NNP) led by Prime Minister Keith Mitchell.
The NDC was removed from power with the first clean sweep in 2013, primarily because of internal party disunity which undermined the-then prime minister Tillman Thomas (2008-2013). During its four years in power, the NDC suffered four ministerial resignations, with another minister being sacked and 10 members of the party expelled. Thomas also engaged in some dubious constitutional shenanigans in 2012 to avoid a no-confidence motion by persuading the governor-general to prorogue parliament. The electorate gave its unequivocal judgement on all this by failing to elect a single NDC member in the February 2013 election.
The NDC suffered the same dismal fate in 2018, then under the leadership of Nazim Burke, who had been an official in the finance ministry of the revolutionary New Jewel Movement (NJM) that ousted Sir Eric Gairy in the 1979 coup. Burke was then promoted to finance minister under the short-lived rule of the Revolutionary Military Council (RMC) which, in turn, had ousted (and executed) revolutionary leader Maurice Bishop in October 1983. It was a pedigree that clearly did not appeal to the Grenadian electorate of 2018.
Dickon Mitchell was elected at a virtual NDC party convention on 31 October, and in a positive sign for party unity he won by a resounding 277 votes to 43 against nearest rival Phillip Telesford. But it will take more than unity to beat Keith Mitchell and the NNP. The prime minister, who is now serving his fifth term as prime minister, has said that he will lead his party into the next election, but that will be his last. However, speaking on 2 November, he acknowledged that the NNP cannot expect quite such a landslide in 2023, or whenever the election is called. He said, in regard to decisions taken to combat the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic: “We are taking a decision to protect our nation. I have had to tell a number of people on a number of occasions [that] it may cost us some political votes because of some of the decisions that we are taking, but so be it. We should be more concerned that it saves lives, and if it’s one life for 100 votes, we are going to do just that; one life lost is just too much.”
Another consequence of the pandemic, of course, is that the government will be defending a very different economic record in 2023 than it was in 2018. The NNP government inherited an economy that had contracted by 1.2% in 2012. Under its tutelage, the economy then grew by 2.4% in 2013, 7.3% in 2014, 6.4% in 2015, 3.7% in 2016, and 4.4% in both 2017 and 2018.
The NNP government also dealt effectively with a debt crisis that saw the national debt peak at 108% of GDP in 2013. Since then, with the help of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and some debt restructuring, national debt was reduced to 60% of GDP before the pandemic.
Now, debt is rising again, back to over 70% of GDP, and in 2020 the economy contracted by 13.1%. Of course, the NNP can legitimately say that the economic collapse was nothing to do with the government, and it can say that it was in reasonable shape to cope with the catastrophe only because it had got the country’s finances in order. It would take strong nerves to bet against Keith Mitchell securing yet another term in power, albeit with a reduced majority.