Dominica, Faroe Islands VOTE
From the eastern Caribbean to beyond the North Sea, two island nations with unique systems and challenges have gone to the polls. Just two more remain this year—Fiji and Tunisia next week. Stand by!
Continuing our pledge that Andelman Unleashed will chronicle every presidential or national leadership election around the world, the focus today is on Dominica and the Faroe Islands.
First, Dominica
At first blush, it's hard to imagine just why there'd be an election just now in this tiny eastern Caribbean island nation—at 289 square miles the size of Lexington, Kentucky, and with a population of 71,172—its name bestowed on it by Christopher Columbus who first spotted it on a Sunday in November 1493.
The incumbent president Roosevelt Skerrit had just won his third consecutive victory three years ago, with a parliamentary majority of 18 seats to 3. Such an unassailable parliamentary majority would be the envy of most politicians anywhere. And he has let it be known this will likely be his last term as Dominica's leader.
But in November, Skerrit called a snap election and this time he walked away with 19 of 21 seats in the parliament. Perhaps most importantly, not a single seat was won by the opposition party. Oh, and incidentally, the electoral clock re-set to give him five more years in power. "In the eastern Caribbean, it is actually the norm to call a snap election where you already have a majority in parliament and you're still three years or four years out before the next election," Wazim Mowla, who heads the Caribbean Initiative of the Atlantic Council told me in a telephone interview. Mowla pointed most recently to Prime Minister Mia Mottley in Barbados who, "when she had 29 of the 30 parliamentary seats, called a snap election and now has all 30 seats" in her nation's parliament. "This is definitely a trend in the Caribbean," Mowla emphasized.
In part this is due to some determined and successful challenges to long-standing national leaders. In St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Ralph Gonsalves has been in power for more than 20 years. In Grenada, barely 225 miles south of Dominica, Prime Minister Keith Mitchell, who'd led his country for more than 20 years in two stretches going back to 1995, just lost his office to a 45-year-old challenger with little political experience. Without question Skerrit, who's served as Dominica's prime minister for 18 years was watching events unfolding nearby with intense interest.
Still, why right now? "Incumbents have been losing power when it comes to elections because of a variety of reasons—the pandemic, food insecurity, higher electricity prices," Mowla explained. The prime minister's fear was that if he was unable to stabilize an increasingly shaky economic environment, he and especially his hitherto dominant party risked losing electoral ground. "So, he saw an opportunity when the opposition lost its leader," Mowla concluded.
Indeed, when he first called the vote, the Prime Minister himself suggested, “We need a refreshed Dominica Labor Party team, for these very unpredictable, unprecedented and very challenging times. I want for the year 2023 to begin with a fresh mandate, given to a fresh Labor team, to commence the work of building post-COVID Dominica.”
None of this is to suggest that neither Dominica nor any one of these Caribbean islands are anything but thoroughly democratic nations with free elections.
Indeed, the British Commonwealth Observers sent a team to monitor the Dominica elections, quickly issuing a report: "The findings of the Group’s observation concluded that election day and the pre-election atmosphere were largely peaceful, and voters were free to exercise their franchise, the results of which are a collective will of those who voted."
Mowla added that "these nations remain democratically stable, remain close to the United States and Britain, and so usually fly under the radar."
This is not to say that there aren't still challenges overhanging Dominica and its government. The sale of "golden passports" for as little as $100,000 under a Citizenship by Investment Program, which has helped this nation balance its budget since the program's creation in 1993, has been widely criticized. In January, the government warned its CIP agents to scale back on marketing passports as visa-free entry vehicles to the European Union and Britain. Which they certainly have been.
Then, the Faroe Islands
There was another snap election half a world to the north in the tiny 18-island nation of the Faroe Islands, for a less auspicious reason. The Faroese (what this island nation-of-a-sort calls its 49,053 people), or at least their prime minister, summarily fired the foreign minister, Jenis av Rana, following "numerous statements against queer people," as The High Country News put it. Prime Minister Bárður à Steig Nielsen announced that he'd sacked Rana, the leader of Miðflokkurin, a Christian conservative party also known as the Center Party. Miðflokkurin promptly withdrew its support for the government. The ruling coalition collapsed, and Nielsen had to call a new election.
These are quite clearly a people committed to a democratic system. Some 88% of the eligible voters turned out for the balloting, electing anywhere from two to nine representatives from each of six political parties. An 'Independence Party' eked out barely 938 votes and did not win a single seat in parliament.
With the opposition Social Democrats (Javnaöarflokkurin) leading with just nine seats, it is clear that a coalition will be necessary. Rana's Miðflokkurin party managed just 6.6% of the vote and two seats. Despite the renown of incumbent Prime Minister Nielsen as goalkeeper on the national handball team, his Unionist Party came in second with seven seats. The right-wing People's Party won six seats, as did the Republic Party, which wants the tiny nation to become utterly independent of Denmark.
Especially striking is that the Faroese, while citizens of the Faroe Islands, are more fully citizens of Denmark. It's almost as though the Scots really did have independence within the United Kingdom. Only less so, or perhaps more depending on your point of view. These 18 rocky islands are a "constituent nation" of the Kingdom of Denmark. Indeed, way off beyond the North Sea, closer to Great Britain or Norway than to Denmark, it would seem an appropriate candidate for full independence. Yet while the Faroes sends one member to the Danish parliament, Greenland, still further afield, sends three. And when Donald Trump suggested he might want to buy Greenland, there were horrified cries that echoed out from Copenhagen across Europe.
The Faroes also have their own 33-member parliament, the Tinganes, housed in a collection of crimson buildings with traditional turf roofs in the capital of Tórshaven.
In these buildings facing out on the forbidding North Sea, sit not only the parliament but also the prime minister and a whole list of cabinet offices—Ministers of Finance, Health, Education & Foreign Affairs, Fisheries, Social Affairs, and Environment, Industry & Trade. Defense is handled by the Danish armed forces. Queen Margrethe II of Denmark names the "high commissioner," but the prime minister and real political power here is Faroese to the bone.
As it happens, Sjurdur Sjaale, the one Faroese member of the Danish parliament (and the three from Greenland) chose to throw their weight behind Mette Frederiksen, which helped assure her hair breadth re-election as Denmark's prime minister, which we chronicled early last month.
As for who will actually be able to assemble a coalition and form a new government for the Faroes in the wake of this deeply fractured election remains an open question. Aksel V. Johannesen, head of the opposition Social Democrats, said he could work with the center-right Unionists or the leftist, independence-minded Republic Party. With his nine seats, it would appear he could need at least two other parties to reach a 17-seat majority. Stand by.