BRIDGETOWN, Barbados — Prime Minister Owen Arthur’s ruling Barbados Labour Party (BLP) secured an expected historic consecutive third-term victory at Wednesday’s general election, retaining its more than two thirds parliamentary majority.

It, however lost eight per cent of the popular electoral support secured in the 1999 general election; suffered the defeat of its education minister to an opposition newcomer, and retained four of its seats by surprising low margins.

The BLP’s landslide victory also failed to secure a major stated objective of campaign 2003 — the defeat of the president/leader of the Democratic Labour Party, economist Clyde Mascoll.

Prime Minister Arthur had vowed to throw the full weight of the party’s election machine into the battleground St Michael North West constituency to ensure that Mascoll did not stage a successful comeback.

At the 1999 election, the incumbent Mascoll had lost the seat to BLP’s Mark Williams. This time around, he reclaimed with a majority of 538 votes.

With overall official results expected to be released today by the Electoral and Boundaries Commission), Arthur’s BLP, which has been governing this Eastern Caribbean island since 1994, secured 23 of the 30 seats for the House of Assembly with 75,176 of the popular votes, or some 56.3 per cent of the 133,432 valid ballots cast.

The DLP, which held just two of the then 28 House of Assembly seats at the time of dissolution of parliament in April for the May 21 election, showed a very significant electoral recovery by capturing 58, 256 of the popular votes, or 43.7 per cent with a turn out of 60.6 per cent of the eligible electors.

While, therefore, under the first-past-the-post, or “winner-takes-all” electoral system, the opposition secured only seven of the 30 constituencies — five more than it held in the previous parliament — the margin of popular votes that separated the BLP and DLP is just below 17,000.

The defeat of the minister of education, Rudolph Greenidge by the DLP’s first-timer, Michael Lashley, a lawyer, was one of the upsets of the election.

An evidently disappointed Prime Minister Arthur, who is expected to announce his new Cabinet over the coming weekend, said that Greenidge’s defeat for St Philip South riding, was “one of the seats we should have won”.

The two other losing MPs were David Gill (St Michael South Central) and Mark Williams (St Michael North West). It was the St Michael North West constituency for which the BLP had committed the resources at its command to prevent the DLP’s Mascoll from winning.

Mascoll told his jubilant supporters he was looking forward to “the further rebuilding” of his party with the set objective of “maintaining the momentum” for a return to governmental power.

The four constituencies that the incumbent BLP retained with margins well below 200 were: Christ Church South where Health Minister Jerome Walcott, won by 60; St Joseph by 78; St Michael South (once held for some 23 years by former Prime Minister Erskine Sandiford) by 116;

In St Michael Central the speaker of the last Parliament, Ishmael Roett, managed to hold on by 126 votes against the DLP’s newcomer Steve Blackett.

Not since the DLP under its founder-leader, the late Errol Barrow, achieved a third consecutive electoral victory between 1961 and 1971, during which it led Barbados into political independence in October 1966, has a party scored such an electoral feat as the BLP did on Wednesday.