Amid jubilation JLP to assess why it lost 15 seats
Despite victory in the 2025 General Election on Wednesday, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) says it has a lot of introspection to do, especially given that it lost 15 seats which it had won in the election five years ago.
“We have come out victorious, which I am happy for [but] we have to engage in a process of reflection,” JLP Campaign Chairman Dr Christopher Tufton said at a post-election news conference on Thursday at the party’s Belmont Road headquarters in St Andrew.
“This is the most important political exercise in our democracy. After every event there is almost a default mode of assessments to determine where we are, what we did well and what we did not do so well. All of that is around how we connect with the Jamaican people. There is no room for complacency. It is a reality that we have more work to do. Nothing will be taken for granted,” added Tufton.
Preliminary results from Wednesday’s election show the JLP beating the People’s National Party (PNP) by winning 34 constituencies to the PNP’s 29.
In 2020, the JLP won 49 seats while the PNP won 14. There are 63 seats in the House of Representatives.
On Thursday, JLP campaign spokeswoman Kamina Johnson Smith said there was a need to look at some constituencies closely, including Kingston Central and St Mary South Eastern which were among the seats that were won by close margins.
Preliminary results show the PNP’s Steve McGregor won Kingston Central by 12 votes over the JLP’s Donovan Williams, while in St Mary South Eastern the PNP’s Christopher Brown defeated the JLP’s Norman Dunn by 11 votes.
Johnson Smith said the JLP is also looking at Portland Eastern, where the JLP’s Ann-Marie Vaz lost by 135 votes to the PNP’s Isat Buchanan, and St James Southern which saw the PNP’s Nekeisha Burchell defeating the JLP’s Homer Davis by 207 votes.
“We are quite confident, however, that the 34 seats which the Jamaica Labour Party won, we won them outright and therefore they are unlikely to shift. Therefore we are in a mode of what can be added as opposed to moving in any other direction,” Johnson Smith said.
“We are approaching with all humility, with all respect and reverence for our democratic process — which we celebrate entirely and ensuring that we continue to share the information about the realities of the work here in Jamaica — the fact that we enter this third term with the lowest poverty rate in the history of Jamaica and the lowest unemployment rate in the history of Jamaica, with a debt-to-GDP ratio which was cut by more than 50 per cent over the last Administration, providing a base for us to do more,” she said.
