BRIDGETOWN, Barbados — Barbadian voters will go to the polls today to choose a new government.

All indicators, however, suggest that the incumbent Barbados Labour Party (BLP) of Prime Minister Owen Arthur will be returned with a comfortable majority for an historic third consecutive term.

But Arthur’s BLP (‘Bees’) would be doing so after a very bruising three-week campaign to win hearts and minds among the 220,088 eligible voters.

It’s stout reputation for good economic house-keeping has been somewhat tarnished by a relentless attack from the opposition Democratic Labour Party (DLP), in advertisements and platform salvos, about alleged poor public accountability involving a range of public sector projects and management.

In an earlier report on an expected third term for the Bees, it was noted that if the January 1999 election had proved a shocking humiliation for the DLP (‘Dems’) with just two of the then 28 parliamentary seats, today’s poll — which has been called 10 months early — could mark the turning point in the DLP’s re-emergence for control of state power.

According to the latest opinion poll results published at the weekend in the Sunday Sun, the Bees could secure between 20 and 22 of the 30 parliamentary seats, with the Dems taking between eight to 10.

The Dems held eight seats at the 1994 election, months after its then prime minister, Erskine Sandiford, suffered a no-confidence vote in parliment. By the January 1999 it lost six of those eight seats, crushed by a BLP 26-2 landslide.

If, therefore, it secures 10, or even eight when the counting is over late tonight with the BLP still under the leadership of a popular prime minister, the DLP would have laid a good foundation for its return to power five years down the road.

For one thing, it would have to respond to the kind of “leadership” propaganda it has been subjected to from the BLP, and the Bees themselves would have had to find a suitable replacement for Owen Arthur, for whom this third term would most likely be his swansong in electoral politics.

In a free and fair election, for which Barbados has a stout performance record, the voters have a habit of often proving the pollsters wrong.

Addressing a campaign meeting before he squared off with Prime Minister Arthur in a live 90-minute televised debate on the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Monday night, the Dems leader, economist Clyde Mascoll, had his own reading of the likely outcome of today’s election.

He said that contrary to the poll conducted by the UWI (Cave Hill)-based Caribbean Development Research Services (CADRES), his party’s own assessment of voters’ preferences indicate that the DLP was “leading in 14 of the 30 constituencies and could pick up another four”.

Available data point to the ruling BLP having an estimated 16 per cent lead over its challenger for power, the DLP with an anticipated 57 per cent and 41 per cent performance rating, respectively. This compares with a 65 per cent and 35 per cent performance by the Bees and Dems, respectively in the last 1999 election.

With a current swing of some six per cent in its favour away from the Bees, the Dems were, therefore, in need of an additional 10 per cent swing as of last Friday to frustrate the incumbent’s optimism of a third consecutive term in government.