In historic fashion, the Caribbean island of Barbados recently elected the nation's first female prime minister.
Mia Amor Mottley, 52, won in a landslide Thursday against the leader of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) and current Prime Minister Freundel Stuart. Since 2008, the Democratic Labour Party has held power and went virtually unchallenged in the nation.
She leads a wave of change in more ways than one. As leader of the Barbados Labour Party (BLP), she campaigned hard on a platform against exorbitant taxes and the high cost of living on the island that many of her followers blame the DLP's decade-long stay in power.
With a beaming endorsement from Rihanna, Mottley and the BLP will take over all 30 seats in the country’s House of Assembly and work on stabilizing the country's fledgling economy that hasn't recovered from the 2008 global financial crisis.
Mottley will serve as the eighth prime minister of Barbados since the country's independence. She joins a list of other notable women like the late Dame Eugenia Charles of Dominica, Janet Jagan of Guyana, Portia Simpson Miller in Jamaica and Kamla Persad Bissessar in Trinidad and Tobago who have led their nations and made history.
There were issues with the official ballots forcing the vote to Friday, according to TeleSur. Stuart, realizing that victory was no longer in sight, conceded in the wee hours of the morning making Mottley's win official. The BLP won by a 10-15 percent margin of victory despite numerous other political parties.
"The historic reality is that we have small swing elections and big swing elections. 2013 was clearly a small swing election; this one is likely to be a big swing election, largely because the two follow in sequence. So even if I were to set aside any poll data and say, ‘let’s look at it purely in terms of history,' we are looking at a swing in excess of five percent, bearing in mind that the swing needed to change the Government is less than two percent," Barbadian pollster, Peter Wickham, told online newspaper Barbados Today.
The election is now over and Mottley plans to get to work. New BLP assemblymen are focusing on initiatives that will improve garbage collection, public transportation, and infrastructure.
