Opposition Leader Ron Green
ROSEAU, Dominica, CMC – Less than a week after it was severely trounced in a general election, the main opposition United Workers Party (UWP) is demanding a new poll and is threatening to stay away from the new Parliament.
UWP leader, Ron Green, said that the party’s executive had taken the decision in light of the “fraudulent nature” of the December 18 general election in which the ruling Dominica Labour Party (DLP) won 18 of the 21 seats at stake.
Green, one of the casualties of the poll, said that there had been “gross and unprecedented irregularities, fraud and breaches of the laws of Dominica in this general election”.
He said as a result, the UWP would “boycott the parliament” for various reasons including “the unprecedented use of bribery to unlawfully influence the election result” as well as the “the denial of the opposition of access to state owned media which rendered the elections grossly unfair”.
Green said that there had also been an inducement to Dominicans residing overseas to come home and vote resulting in a distortion of the results.
“Political bribery of any kind is against the laws of Dominica under the House of Assembly’s Election Act ….The Dominica Labour Party has conducted the elections in a manner that flagrantly disregarded these provisions,” Green said.
He said that despite the election, which was monitored by teams from the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), was conducted in a civil manner on Election Day, the preceding “illegal and fraudulent” acts undermined the legitimacy of the process.
“We demand therefore, fresh general elections under an immediately cleansed electoral list and electoral reform to render the process of voting free and fair. In the meantime the United Workers Party will boycott this parliament as illegitimate, until our demands are met,” he said.
The UWP also called on ‘patriotic’ citizens and institutions to prevent, what Green called a “creeping dictatorship,” from wiping out the democratic rights and freedoms of citizens.
Apart from Green, the party’s deputy leader, Claudius Sanford, also lost his seat in the election.
