So far nine parties are eligible to participate in the January 9 early election (see related story), while the registration requests of three new ones remain pending. It’s not likely that voters will have a dozen candidate lists to choose from though, for several reasons.
The most obvious of those is the reregistration of United People’s (UP) Party and the Democratic Party (DP), the latter now as “DPSXMovement.” These two had joined forces for the 2018 election soon after the passage of Hurricane Irma as United Democrats (UD), but it appears that political “marriage of convenience” is over.
As UD is still listed among the now eligible parties, a maximum eight of these are expected to be on the ballot. Of course, being registered is no guarantee either that especially parties currently without representation in Parliament will in fact be running.
For one thing, they must garner the support of 135 voters for their candidate lists; one per cent of last year’s total valid vote. That would include both the UP and DP, because they are not part of the outgoing legislature as such.
Some parties may decide not to make use of their right to contest the poll after all like before, while others might merge as also happened in the recent past. The fact that only United St. Maarten Party (US Party) had already signalled its clear intention to run and who will head the list would seem to indicate the process of finding candidates is an ongoing one in many cases, so surprises certainly can’t be excluded at this time.
As stated earlier, if the turnout is around 65 per cent it would take about 1,000 votes to earn the all-important first seat, without which parties don’t qualify for possible residual seats. That is the threshold they must surpass to join the political establishment and hope to make a difference.
