Britt and I are fascinated by politics, and have worked on local and national campaigns. So it's especially interesting for us that the Bahamas is having an election (for the national assembly, kind of like Congress, I guess) next Wednesday.

It's just like an election at home...but different. Instead of Democrats and Republicans, here there is the FNM and the PLP. I don't know what they stand for (either platforms or initials) but from seeing placards around the various settlements, I know that PLP is "the clear choice", while voting for FNM is a "matter of trust".

All of the placards look essentially alike. There's a colored border - yellow for PLP candidates, red for FNM. The candidate is a black man in his 40s or 50s (and yes, both the Abacos and Eleuthera have large white populations and are about 50% female, but on every poster I've seen, the candidate is a black man). He wears a suit and looks out of the picture with a benign, avuncular expression. The identical typeface is used for name and party affiliation. In fact, here in South Eleuthera the
candidates even have the same name: Hubert Ingraham of the FNM is challenging incumbent Oswald Ingraham of the PLP.

(I don't know if they're related. It's not uncommon in the Bahamas for there to be just a few surnames that dominate each island. The original black settlers were slaves, who took their former master's surname. And on the islands where descendants of the (white) Loyalists remained, everyone's related to each other, I suspect.)

The posters are all over the settlements, on telephone poles and walls and fences. There aren't many bumper stickers - we've seen a few, but I suspect that in a country where cars must last a long time, people are unwilling to put permanent advertising on them. Instead, nearly every car has two little flags mounted on plastic pieces that fit between the window and the door frame, one on the driver's side and one on the passenger's. Yellow and purple for PLP, red, white, and blue for FNM.

(At first, my American eye thought there were an awful lot of pizza delivery cars in the Bahamas! Then I realized what the flags were. I think it's a great idea and wish we had them in the US!)

We first noticed the political placards and flags in Marsh Harbour, but as the election approaches, things are getting to fever pitch. Earlier this afternoon, we heard honking and yelling; we poked our heads out of the boat to see a parade going by, evidently a political rally. (With binoculars we made out the colors: yellow and purple.)

It's all faintly bizarre to me, of course, because I am an outsider. I don't know anything about the parties or the candidates other than what they look like and which colors they wave. Which makes me realize that the American political process probably looks equally as weird to a non-American!
- posted by S/V Windom @ 4/25/2007 [link]