Dr Thomson Fontaine elected as new UWP leader
The United Workers Party (UWP), the biggest opposition party, has elected Dr. Thompson Fontaine as its leader. He has vowed to uphold the UWP’s position on electoral reform using lawful methods, including civil disobedience.
At the party’s delegate convention on Sunday night, Fontaine defeated Clement Marcellin by a margin of 123 to 79.
Marcellin later won the position of deputy leader.
Lennox Linton, the former opposition leader who resigned in October and was chosen without opposition as the opposition party’s president on Sunday, is replaced by Fontaine, a policy adviser to the South Sudanese administration.
Fontaine, who was charged with inciting violence and obstructing justice in 2017 and is currently out on EC$75,000 bond, assured supporters that he planned to keep up the party’s campaign for electoral change in Dominica.
The UWP is refusing to participate in the general election that Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit set for December 6 because it believes that electoral reform, including the creation of voter identification cards and a new voter list, must be addressed first.
“As a political force, we’ll stick with promoting election change. We will once more request, as part of this procedure, that Charles Savarin, President of Dominica, utilise his executive authority under section 53 of the Constitution and postpone the elections until there has been electoral reform.
“You can be confident that the United Workers Party will use every legal strategy—including civil disobedience, the judicial system, and other legal means—to ensure that there is electoral reform. Together, we won’t give up until Dominica has genuine electoral reform and democracy has been restored, added Fontaine.
Both the UWP and the Dominica Freedom Party (DFP), the other significant opposition party, have urged voters to abstain from the polls until Sir Dennis Byron, the former head of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), has finished his work as the lone commissioner leading the charge for electoral reform.
The first part of Sir Byron’s report was supposed to be presented by the end of November, and the legislation on the Register of Electors was supposed to be introduced in the Parliament in December with a goal of becoming law in January 2023.
At a political event on Sunday night for his party, the Dominica Labour Party (DLP), Prime Minister Skerrit declared that he now supported the UWP’s decision to abstain from voting.
God works in strange ways, and occasionally we are unable to see it.
However, the Lord desires for our country to experience greater togetherness as part of a national reset, eradicating the political tribalism and hatred that exist there.
“The Lord has indicated he does not want these kinds of people in Dominica’s Parliament any longer, which is why when the Workers Party said they would boycott elections, this was the Lord’s work. They are extremely divisive and spread far too much hostility throughout our nation.
The main opposition party has “set brother against brother…and that’s not right,” Skerrit added. “We don’t have to agree all the time, but we have to respect one other.”
One of the six DLP candidates who won their constituency nominations without opposition on December 6 will not face the electorate is Skerrit 50, who has served as prime minister of this country since 2004.
